Troubleshooting

ITables tables are interactive, but that requires JavaScript to actually run in whatever is displaying the notebook. When it can’t, you will see one of two things instead: a table stuck on “Loading ITables…”, or, since ITables v2.9, a small static preview. This page explains both, and how to get the interactive table back

• when that is possible.

Stuck on “Loading ITables…”?

Show code cell source

Hide code cell source

import pandas as pd

import itables

df = pd.DataFrame()

itables.show(df, connected=False)

ⓘ

This means your browser can run JavaScript, but the DataTables library that ITables relies on was never loaded. The most likely causes are:

• You forgot to run init_notebook_mode() (like in the example above), or you deleted that cell or its output.

• You ran init_notebook_mode(connected=True) but you are not connected to the internet, so the library cannot be fetched.

Tip

If you change the value of the connected argument in the init_notebook_mode cell, you need to re-execute all the cells that display interactive tables.

Seeing a static preview instead?

If, instead of “Loading…”, you see non-interactive table, then JavaScript could not run at all where that table is being rendered - your browser was never given the chance to load anything. In that case, ITables v2.9+ falls back to a static preview: a plain HTML (or, when printed by itables.show() outside of a notebook, Markdown) table with only the first rows - 10 by default, or as many as your pageLength/lengthMenu options say. This lets you check the table content, but you can’t sort, search or paginate it. Here is what that plain HTML table looks like:

from IPython.display import HTML, display

df = itables.sample_dfs.get_countries()
display(HTML(itables.to_html_static_preview(df)))

ⓘ	region	country	capital	longitude	latitude
code
AW	Latin America & Caribbean	Aruba	Oranjestad	-70.016700	12.516700
AF	South Asia	Afghanistan	Kabul	69.176100	34.522800
AO	Sub-Saharan Africa	Angola	Luanda	13.242000	-8.811550
AL	Europe & Central Asia	Albania	Tirane	19.817200	41.331700
AD	Europe & Central Asia	Andorra	Andorra la Vella	1.521800	42.507500
AE	Middle East & North Africa	United Arab Emirates	Abu Dhabi	54.370500	24.476400
AR	Latin America & Caribbean	Argentina	Buenos Aires	-58.417300	-34.611800
AM	Europe & Central Asia	Armenia	Yerevan	44.509000	40.159600
AS	East Asia & Pacific	American Samoa	Pago Pago	-170.691000	-14.284600
AG	Latin America & Caribbean	Antigua and Barbuda	Saint John's	-61.845600	17.117500
(198 more rows not shown)

There are two situations where this happens, and only one of them can be fixed:

• You can fix it: the notebook you’re viewing is not trusted. This happens when you have not run the notebook in full yourself - e.g. it was sent to you with outputs, or it was created by a tool like papermill. Tell Jupyter that you trust it (run “Trust Notebook” in View / Activate Command Palette), and the interactive table will appear.

• You can’t fix it: you are looking at a static rendering of the notebook, such as GitHub’s preview of an .ipynb file. There, JavaScript never runs, no matter how the notebook was created or trusted, so the static preview is all you will ever see on that page. Open the notebook in an actual, JavaScript-capable Jupyter session to get the interactive table. See static_preview_demo.ipynb for a live example of both.

Check ITables’ version

If the above does not help, please check out the ChangeLog and decide whether you should upgrade itables. You can tell the version of ITables that you are using by looking at the loading message (from ITables v2.0.1 on) or by running this code snippet:

import itables

itables.__version__

'2.9.0'