Allow notebook-output to be marked as transient per instance

As an extension author, I want to be able to set transientOutputs on a per-notebook document basis.

For example, say I invent some notebook format that provides a way to store per-document configuration values. One of those values controls whether or not outputs are persisted. In this scenario, some notebooks should have transientOutputs: true and others transientOutputs: false. To reflect this properly, I want to be able to set NotebookDocumentContentOptions on a per-notebook basis, probably in the content provider.

As for why that would be useful: If I am committing notebooks to a repository, I most likely do not want to persist outputs, especially if they are dependent on time/machine/location/etc (i.e. if they are liable to change). However, if I have a notebook outside of source control (that I’m using for tests/experiments/etc), I likely want outputs to persist.

[DonJayamanne]

I too have a similar requirement for kusto notebooks.

When looking at some telemetry i’d like to save the graphs & the output E.g. a pie chart that represents how many failures we had. this information doesn’t contain any PII.

I’d like to keep this information for historical purposes. so when i run this again next week as a new cell, i can compare it against the previous week (another cell).

The only way I can think of doing this is;

• Create cell A and run it, save output
• next week, create cell B with same code as cell A, run it
• now compare output of A & B

Original issue https://github.com/DonJayamanne/vscode-kusto/issues/23

[jrieken]

Yeah, I was having similar thoughts when persisting output for GitHub issue notebooks. Tho, for that it would have been per output/metadata value. E.g when a cell contains @me I don’t want to save its output and that fact is very dynamic (changes after providing NotebookData)