How to properly reference ipywidgets elements in sphinx documentation for third party packages?

[jmborr]

trafficstars

Referencing ipywidgets components in RST documents doesn't include a link after building In my conf.py file:

# Domains for intersphinx inventory file objects.inv
intersphinx_mapping = {
    'ipywidgets': ('http://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest', None),
}

Then in the docstrings of my class methods, I've tried referencing class Widget in different ways

    def link_widget(self, widget, mapping=None):
        r"""Link the value of a single ipywidget to one trait, or the values
        of the element widgets of a composite ipywidget to different traits.
        The specific traits can be specified with the `mapping` argument.

        :class:`~ipywidgets:Widget`
        :class:`~ipywidgets:widget.Widget`
        :class:`~ipywidgets:widgets.widget.Widget`

        :class:`~ipywidgets:ipywidgets.Widget`
        :class:`~ipywidgets:ipywidgets.widget.Widget`
        :class:`~ipywidgets:ipywidgets.widgets.widget.Widget`

        Parameters
        ----------
        widget: :class:`~ipywidgets:ipywidgets.widgets.widget.Widget`
        mapping : str, dict, or **None**
...

None of these syntax seem to work. Can you please specify which syntax to use?

[vidartf]

ipywidgets currently does not have correctly configured api docs, so it does not export any references to use for intersphinx. To inspect the ipywidgets intersphinx inventory, the following code is useful:

from sphinx.ext.intersphinx import inspect_main
inspect_main(['http://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/objects.inv'])

[jmborr]

I decided to insert hyperlinks pointing to elements in the latest release tag, for instance class Widget

    def link_widget(self, widget, mapping=None):
        r"""Link the value of a single ipywidget to one trait, or the values
        of the element widgets of a composite ipywidget to different traits.
        The specific traits can be specified with the `mapping` argument.

        Parameters
        ----------
        widget: `Widget <https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/blob/v7.0.0a1/ipywidgets/widgets/widget.py#L238>`_
       .
       .

[vidartf]

I'm going to keep this issue open in order to track as a request for API docs (which would be nice).

[maxnoe]

It seems this issue got addressed some time in the past, there are API docs now:

https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/ipywidgets.html