Extend candidate aliases

[mattijn]

As was originally posted by @mattijn in https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/2732#issuecomment-1335673267:

There are more candidate aliases I think?

import requests as r
import re
vl_scheme = r.get('https://vega.github.io/schema/vega-lite/v5.json').json()
scheme_str = str(vl_scheme['definitions'])
col = []
for word in re.findall(r"\w+", scheme_str):
    if 'Params' in word:
        col.append(word)
list(set(col))

Returns 10 candidates:

['TimeUnitParams',
 'TitleParams',
 'SchemeParams',
 'GraticuleParams',
 'SequenceParams',
 'BinParams',
 'ImputeParams',
 'ScaleBinParams',
 'ScaleInterpolateParams',
 'AutoSizeParams']

I think we can extend the aliases to all of these. I was trying:

alt.Color('value:Q').scale(scheme=alt.Scheme('viridis'))

But hit an:

AttributeError: module 'altair' has no attribute 'Scheme'

[ChristopherDavisUCI]

Hi @mattijn, that sounds fine to me. The reason I proposed aliases for some of these like BinParams but not others was just for symmetry with the Property Setters. For example, I believe there is a bin Property Setter, but not a scheme Property Setter. No other opinion on my end, just wanted to record this.

[mattijn]

Thanks for the clarification @ChristopherDavisUCI, that make sense for #2732. The remaining properties are indeed not available as Property Setter, but it is still useful to have an alias I think.

[joelostblom]

In addition to what @ChristopherDavisUCI mentioned, I think it does make sense to include alias for the classes that we expect users to directly interface with (and maybe hiding the *Params version from tab completion for those that have shortcuts?). For example, do we need aliases for 'GraticuleParams', 'SequenceParams', since there is already alt.sequence and alt.graticule?

[joelostblom]

Maybe we should also consider adding shortcuts for some of the *Config classes? Maybe not as important but I just learned in https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/3216#issuecomment-1747437368 that we can do something like

alt.Chart(iris, view=alt.ViewConfig(strokeWidth=0))

Which might seem inconsistent with that if we modify say the height we can use alt.Step instead of alt.StepConfig

alt.Chart(iris, height=alt.Step(40))

So I wonder if it should also be called just alt.View. However, there are a lot of these config options, so maybe there is a chance of name collisions with other objects and maybe Config is fundamentally something different so it makes sense to be explicit in the name?

import requests as r
import re
vl_scheme = r.get('https://vega.github.io/schema/vega-lite/v5.json').json()
scheme_str = str(vl_scheme['definitions'])
col = []
for word in re.findall(r"\w+", scheme_str):
    if 'Config' in word:
        col.append(word)
list(set(col))

['RectConfig',
 'ProjectionConfig',
 'BarConfig',
 'LegendConfig',
 'AreaConfig',
 'PointSelectionConfig',
 'AnyMarkConfig',
 'MarkConfig',
 'HeaderConfig',
 'ScaleConfig',
 'ErrorBarConfig',
 'BrushConfig',
 'BoxPlotConfig',
 'TitleConfig',
 'PointSelectionConfigWithoutType',
 'IntervalSelectionConfigWithoutType',
 'Config',
 'CompositionConfig',
 'SelectionConfig',
 'LineConfig',
 'AxisConfig',
 'ErrorBandConfig',
 'FormatConfig',
 'TickConfig',
 'StyleConfigIndex',
 'IntervalSelectionConfig',
 'RangeConfig',
 'ViewConfig']