[FR] Persist state of "Columns Selection".

[PhilipMay]

This is the same FR as #3691 (Persist state of "Hide Experiment List".) but with persistence of the "Columns Selection".

Also see mlflow-mailing list topic: "How to either memorize column selection, or use sql to query mlflow?"

[jdlesage]

Hello. FYI, we implemented something very similar in our forks. The main difference is we persist the list in the URL. It enables to share a view to an experiment by mail or instant messaging. You can prepare your board with only the columns you want then share the URL to your team mates.

We didn't push a PR to the main mlflow repo because this FR implies lot of changes and some refactoring on the JS part. Here a link to our changes in our fork: https://github.com/criteo-forks/mlflow/pull/199 https://github.com/criteo-forks/mlflow/pull/178

The main changes we did are:

• States are stored at ExperimentPage level, and the columns are filtered in the Table. These arguments must be injected from Page to Component to Table. (and the dropdown with columns list must have also a callback to store the state)
• The dropdown with columns list manages a "exclude list"... We changed it to an "include list"
• It also implies to have the list of all available columns for an experiment. We added an endpoint for this.

Do not hesitate to reuse our PRs. We will be happy to contribute.

[senarvi]

It took me a while to find this. I was also annoyed by the fact that every time I get back to the experiment page, MLflow resets the columns I'm viewing.

When I compare two runs, in the upper left corner there's a link to the experiment. Clicking it is the most logical thing to do to get back to the experiment page. However, the link points to the bare experiment URL without the column information. So one should use the back button of the browser instead.