How to prevent reload of preceding cells when changing widget value and/or make ipywidgets work?

[hmanz]

Hello. Thanks again for making Mercury, it's been great for dashboards! One thing that I need help with is how to let the user update tables or plots without reloading all the previous cells (and making the screen do the grey-out with circle loading mouse) every time. The issue with this is that if the user made changes to previous cells, all those changes get reset when those previous cells are reloaded.

For updating tables, what I've done is just use itables with the SearchBuilder extension, which allows the user to add a filter and update the table without reloading all the previous cells in the notebook. It's also much faster than the mercury widgets. As a side note, isn't the table widget just a wrapper for itables? Why shouldn't we just use itables instead of the table widget?

For plots I can't use itables, so there seems to be two potential solutions:

1. Make mercury widgets just update the cell they apply to and not reload previous cells.
2. Make ipywidgets work, because when I try using a dropdown ipywidget, it doesn't load in Mercury. This also has the added bonus of letting us put widgets next to the content/cells they apply to, instead of on the sidebar where it's not clear which content they apply to.

Thank you to all the contributors on this project :)