InputWidgetNotDefined exception when running a notebook as a job

[MarcinO]

I have a notebook that reads a value of a text input in a Scala command:

var startTimeStr = dbutils.widgets.get("Run Date")

What doesn't make any sense that this notebook fails with InputWidgetNotDefined error when being scheduled as a job, but works just fine in interactive mode, on the same cluster. Any advice?

[Kaniz]

Hi @MarcinO, The issue you're experiencing is that widgets are unsupported in scheduled jobs in Databricks. When you run a notebook interactively, you can set widget values, which can then be accessed via dbutils.widgets.get().

However, when scheduling a job, there's no interactive interface to set these widget values, which is why you're seeing the InputWidgetNotDefined error.

You can pass the parameters directly to the job during scheduling to resolve this issue. You can do this by defining the parameters in the job configuration and then accessing those parameters in your notebook. dbutils.widgets.get().

[MarcinO]

I have a number of notebooks that have Widgets and I run them both interactively and in job mode without exceptions. The difference that is these notebooks are in Python, and the one I reported InputWidgetNotDefined exception for is in Scala. So I think there is an inconsistency between Scala and Python runtime here.

The reason I like using Widgets for notebooks that I also run as jobs is that you can set parameters manually during testing or, as you said via job parameters, and you use the same dbutils.widgets.get() API to get the input. It works great in Python commands! But for some reason doesn't work in Scala, that's unfortunate.

[berserkersap]

Have you used dbutils.widget.text() before dbutils.widget.get() ?