topic Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets in Community Articles

Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 18:08:42 GMT

Hi all,
TheOC here with my first of (hopefully!) many blogs on the Databricks Community. I'm hoping in this series to share quick, practical tips to help you get the most out of Databricks. Today's topic is: Widgets.

If you're anything like me, you've also fallen into the trap of building notebooks with hard-coded values (dates, environments, column names?). This works fine at first, but as soon as something changes, or we want to share our notebooks, it can become a pain. This is where we should look to use widgets!

Widgets are interactive inputs that can be added to your notebook. This completely negates the need to dig through your code to look for the particular hard-coded value, as now you can simply use the interface you have made to change this. It may feel a small thing, but it can easily make your life so much easier when looking to productionise notebooks.

Here are our options:

Text Box (Free-text input, useful for things like dates or titles)
> dbutils.widgets.text()
Dropdown (Single-selection list input, useful for environments)
> dbutils.widgets.dropdown()
Combobox (Dropdown, plus the option to type in your own value)
> dbutils.widgets.combobox()
Multiselect (Dropdown, but allows for multiple options to be selected)
> dbutils.widgets.multiselect()

Let's look at creating some Widgets, to show you what that looks like!

I'm going to create 4 widgets with the following code:

# 1. Text box dbutils.widgets.text("date", "2025-01-01", "Select Date") # 2. Dropdown dbutils.widgets.dropdown("environment", "dev", ["dev", "test", "prod"], "Environment") # 3. Combobox dbutils.widgets.combobox("region", "NA", ["NA", "EMEA", "APAC", "LATAM"], "Region") # 4. Multiselect dbutils.widgets.multiselect("columns", "sales", ["sales", "profit", "cost"], "Columns")

Let's see what that does:

As you can see, inserting this code and hitting run presents the user with 4 inputs: 'Select Date', 'Environment', 'Region', and 'Columns'.
Getting these into the notebook is great, but now we need to actually use these values entered. This can be done through:
> dbutils.widgets.get
(It's worth knowing that for multiselects, the value is returned as a comma separated list.)

Let's have a look at an example:

How cool is that? In just a few lines we've been able to create a user interface for our notebook, and utilise the values entered. I can't wait to use these on my production workflows to make them easier to reuse and share, and much more future-proofed.
These can easily be used to:

Switch between Dev, Test, and Prod data sources
Select Reporting Periods (P01, P02)
Adjust SQL query filters or limits easily

That's it for the first instalment of Level Up Your Databricks Game. Widgets may seem a simple feature, but once you start using them you'll really unlock value in your projects.
I'd love to hear how you're already using widgets - or where you think you could use them.
Also, do let me know if there's anything specific you'd like me to cover in this series! I have my own ideas but I'd love to hear yours 😀

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

BS_THE_ANALYST — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:33:39 GMT

@TheOC this is cool! This really unlocks others to be able to interact with your notebook without actually breaking them 😂.

I think the idea around parameterisation is great. You could move from notebooks to SQL Queries and how they support parameters. We've also got parameters in AI/BI dashboards. We can then move into Data Engineering as there's so much around parameterisation with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines as well: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/dlt/parameters

There could be a series all around this @TheOC. Happy to help in whatever way I can, should you require another set of hands 👍.

All the best,
BS

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

szymon_dybczak — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:37:17 GMT

Thank @TheOC , really cool presentation of widget capabilities. And I really appreciate that you put effort to create this. I’m really fed up with LLM-generated content, so it’s refreshing to see a post prepared by a human 😄

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Pilsner — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:41:35 GMT

I haven't used widgets much before, but I also hadn't realised the power of them. I will certainly be taking advantage from now on. I am curious if there is a specific date widget that allows you to select a date from a calendar-like table? If not, this would be a cool feature to have.

Thoroughly enjoyed the read, looking forward to the rest of the series, thanks @TheOC.

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:35:19 GMT

hey @BS_THE_ANALYST
Thanks for the support!
Great idea about expanding the particular use-case of parameterisation. I have a few more ideas I'd like to explore with the Level up your Databricks Game series first, but absolutely will be adding that to my list to circle back to.

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:36:14 GMT

hey @szymon_dybczak
Thanks!
Yeah me too, it's somewhat disheartening to look across the Community and see a sea of AI - nice to know there's still a few real humans around! 😂

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:39:33 GMT

hey @Pilsner,
Thanks for the kind words!
I heard about a date-time picker widget from a blog written a few years ago, but it appears that this was an AI hallucination in the blog unfortunately.

There is also an idea/discussion for it here:
https://community.databricks.com/t5/data-engineering/datepicker-widget/td-p/23186

But doesn't seem like there's much movement there unfortunately.

There would be ways of doing this in external packages but seems like the widgets are limited to these 4 options (although I'd love to be proven wrong!)

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Sujitha — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 12:15:57 GMT

@TheOC Congratulations on your very first blog with the Databricks Community! 👏 Looking forward to more such content from you! 🚀

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Khaja_Zaffer — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 12:27:06 GMT

Hey congratulations mate @TheOC I just now learnt about widgets - it was great refreshing.

Keep sharing. Good day!

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Advika — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 13:31:54 GMT

Well written, @TheOC. The way you put this together really draws people in... might even inspire some to start blogging themselves.

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

mceleavey — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:09:41 GMT

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Rishabh_Tiwari — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:39:05 GMT

This was such a fun read, @TheOC! Can’t wait to see what you share next 👏🔥

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

Pilsner — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:17:18 GMT

That's good to know @TheOC , thank you. If I get time, I might have to play around with some external packages, just to see what's possible. 😄

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 19:05:59 GMT

Thank you @Sujitha! Hopefully plenty more to come 🥳

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:11:11 GMT

hey @Khaja_Zaffer, thanks for the kind words!

Let me know how you end up using Widgets 🥳

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:11:51 GMT

hey @Advika
Thank you!

I hope it does inspire others - blogging can be very fun: Just don't let ChatGPT take away all of the creativity 😉

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:14:21 GMT

Re: Level Up Your Databricks Game - Episode 1: Widgets

TheOC — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:15:03 GMT

hey @Rishabh_Tiwari,
Thank you!
Watch this space for the next instalment 👀