FICO^® Xpress Insight Python Package

The 'xpressinsight' Python package can be used to develop Python^® based web applications for Xpress Insight.

Documentation

• FICO Xpress Insight 5 Python Package Reference Manual
• FICO Xpress Insight 5 Developers Guide For Python

Release Notes

v 1.16.0 (Insight 5.16.0)

• When building app from Workbench (3.17 or later), will not generate a model incompatible with installed version of Insight Developer Kit.
• The initialize_entities method will now silently skip populated parameter-type entities if they already have values and overwrite=False, rather than raising an error. (Errors will still be raised when trying to initialize other entity types that already have values.)
• Supports Polars versions up to 1.33, inclusive.

v 1.15.0 (Insight 5.15.0)

• Supports NumPy / Pandas versions up to 2.3.
• Supports Polars versions up to 1.31, inclusive.

v 1.14.0 (Insight 5.14.0)

• Add support for Python 3.13.
• Remove support for Python 3.8.
• Attachment operations will now throw exceptions on errors, if enabled by setting raise_attach_exceptions=True in the AppConfig decorator.
• When AppInterface.get_attach_by_tag finds multiple matching attachments, the AppInterface.attach_status property will be set to SEVERAL_FOUND instead of TOO_MANY.
• The AppInterface.attach_status property may no longer be assigned value IN_PROGRESS.
• Detects if an entity has been assigned duplicated index or index tuple values, and show a warning at the end of the execution mode. This can be upgraded to an error by setting AppConfig.allow_duplicate_indices to False, or suppressed by setting that flag to True.
  • From version 1.17 onwards, we will raise an error on detecting duplicates if allow_duplicate_indices!=True.
• The method EntityBase.check_type is now deprecated, replaced with EntityBase.check_value.
• When executing app, the python_source folder will be added automatically to the PYTHONPATH environment variable, so it can be found by any Python sub-processes.
• Added xi.data.Param function and allowed parameter-type entities to be read by AppInterface.get_scenario_data and InsightRestClient.get_scenario_data.
• Added B3 Propagation fields to InsightContext class.

v 1.13.0 (Insight 5.13.0)

• Log warning lines if operations are taking too long; this can be configured with AppConfig.slow_task_threshold
• An error will be raised if an app or scenario-data container accidentally declares an entity as a class attribute instead of an instance attribute.
• Don't generate error if an entity is assigned an empty Series / Index / DataFrame of the wrong basic type.
• Supports Polars versions up to 1.17, inclusive.
• The following changes only affect test mode:
  • New parameter preserve_insight_work_dir for the xi.create_app function allows previously captured input data and more to be re-used between test runs.
  • When a single-file tag is added to a scenario attachment, it will be removed from any other scenario attachments.

v 1.12.0 (Insight 5.12.0)

• New subpackage xpressinsight.scenario containing client for calling Insight 5 REST API.
• Resolved an issue passing multiple tag names to AppInterface.set_scen_attach_tags

v 1.11.0 (Insight 5.11.0)

• New property AppInterface.user_id for reading the ID of the user executing the scenario.
• Added optional execution resource groups property (exec_resource_groups) to application configuration (AppConfig).
  • Execution mode threads and memory requirements can be set through execution resource groups.
  • Added exec_resource_group_name attribute on the ExecMode, ExecModeLoad and ExecModeRun decorators.
  • threads attribute on the ExecMode, ExecModeLoad and ExecModeRun decorators is deprecated, new apps should use an execution resource group instead.
• New property AppConfig.partial_populate to turn off automatic population of input entities.
• Added function AppInterface.populate to specify a subset of the input entities to populate.
• Added function AppInterface.capture to specify a subset of the entities to capture at the end of the execution mode.
• When passing entity names to AppBase.initialize_entities, column entities may be specified using the syntax <data_frame_name>.<column_name> as an alternative to the entity name.
• When running in test mode, the default attachment rules will be the same as those used when running in Insight 5.11.
• Add support for Polars 1.1.0
• Add support for numpy 2.0

v 1.10.0 (Insight 5.10.0)

• Python 3.12 support.
  • The old syntax for annotating entities (e.g. xi.Scalar instead of xi.types.Scalar) cannot be used when running with Python 3.12.
• Added Polars entity types PolarsIndex and PolarsDataFrame.
• Added new parameter update_keep_result_data to entity definitions, to allow result data to be retained when input entity edited by a view.
• The xi.types.Column class now supports an entity_name attribute, allowing column entities to be given names that are not based on the name of the parent DataFrame.
• Declaring an index entity of type real will now raise an error, where previously it was silently ignored by the Insight server.
• Added IndexBase and DataFrameBase as superclasses of Index and DataFrame. The types of DataFrame.index and Series.index have changed from Tuple[Index, ...] to Tuple[IndexBase, ...].
• Fixed an issue with the get_attach_rules function.
• Added fields platform_token and platform_token_expiry to InsightDmpContext for authorizing requests for platform resources under the authority of a platform client id.

v 1.9.0 (Insight 5.9.0)

• New function AppBase.initialize_entities for initializing selected app entities to their default values.
• Add support for calling app interface & other standard functions from multiple threads.
• The attach_status property now holds the status of the last attachment operation invoked from the current thread; previously it referred to the last attachment operation from any thread.
• The attach_status property is no longer read-only.
• The internal work folder is now called xpressinsight instead of insight.
• The following changes only affect test mode:
  • The execution mode work folder is now a sub-folder work_dir within the application folder.
  • The xpressinsight work folder is now created as a sub-folder of the execution mode work folder.
  • Resolved issues when attachment filenames end .properties.

v 1.8.0 (Insight 5.8.0)

• New function get_scenario_data allows reading entities from other apps and scenarios.
• Introduce xi.types.Column class which can be used in place of xi.Column in app definitions. There is currently no plan to remove xi.Column.
• Attempt to capture entity data after an execution mode that ended abnormally (exception raised or sys.exit called).

v 1.7.1 (Insight 5.7.0)

• New function get_solution_database returns the location and credentials of the DMP solution's database.
• Enabled functions get_app_attach, get_scen_attach and put_scen_attach to write/read the attachment to/from a folder other than the work directory or a local filename different from attachment name.
• Enabled functions get_attach_by_tag, get_attachs_by_tag and get_attach_filenames_by_tag to write the attachments to a folder other than the work directory.
• Fixed an issue with the InsightDmpContext.solution_token_expiry_time value in non-UTC timezones.
• Removed support for Python 3.7. This version supports only Python 3.8 - 3.11.

v 1.6.0 (Insight 5.6.0)

• Resolved an error when a script declares multiple app classes with a shared superclass.
• Added attribute default to the xi.Column class.
• Use of the old syntax for annotating entities (e.g. xi.Scalar instead of xi.types.Scalar) will cause a warning message when the app is built or executed in Python 3.11. This syntax has been deprecated and will not be usable at all in Python 3.12+.
• New function get_insight_context returns information about the Insight server and the DMP solution.
• Python 3.11 support.
• Pandas 2.0 support.

v 1.5.0 (Insight 5.5.0)

• Allow an Index entity to be referenced multiple times within a single Series or DataFrame - e.g. Distance: xi.types.Series(index=['City', 'City'], dtype=xi.real).
• Support multiprocessing package.

v 1.4.1 (Insight 4.59.6 and 4.60.0)

• Resolve issue building apps with Xpress 9.2 and apprunner 1.4.
• Update dependencies to require Pandas v1 with xpressinsight 1.4.

v 1.4.0 (Insight 5.4.0 and 4.59.2)

• New syntax for annotating entities, xi.types.Scalar/Param/Index/Series/DataFrame instead of xi.Scalar/Param/Index/Series/DataFrame.
  • The new syntax is compatible with forward annotations (from __future__ import annotations).
  • The old syntax will continue to work in Python 3.7-3.10 but will not be usable in Python 3.11+, so we recommend existing apps are migrated from the old to the new syntax.
  • When the new syntax is used, entities may also be declared in a parent class of the Insight application class.

v 1.3.0 (Insight 5.3.0 and 4.59.0)

• Support for Insight 5 custom progress notifications:
  • Added functions send_progress_update, get_messages and put_messages to Insight application interface (AppInterface).
  • Added the send_progress attribute the ExecMode, ExecModeLoad, and ExecModeRun decorators.
  • Added the update_progress attribute to the entity type annotations.
• RHEL 8 support.
• Python 3.10 support
  • At time of writing the default Anaconda channel does not have all the dependencies required by the xpressinsight package for this Python version. We recommend conda users to stick with Python 3.9, or use a different distribution of Python 3.10 until this is resolved.
• Fixed an issue that caused a failure if the path to the temporary directory contained a space.

v 1.2.3 (Insight 5.2.1 and 4.58.0)

• Added the threads attribute to the ExecMode, ExecModeLoad, and ExecModeRun decorators.

v 1.2.2

• Fixed an issue that could cause a type check exception when the user created empty (null) fields in a DataFrame column in the Insight UI.

v 1.2.1

• Added test mode functions add_item_info and clear_item_infos to Insight application interface.
• Added function scenario_parent_path to Insight application interface.
• Added RepositoryPath class for building and parsing of repository paths.

v 1.2.0

• Added scenario types property (scen_types) to application configuration (AppConfig).
• Added repository functions get_item_info and get_item_infos to Insight application interface (AppInterface).

v 1.1.3

• Performance improvements.
• Python 3.9 support.

v 1.1.2

• Fixed an exception that could occur when an empty MultiIndex DataFrame has been assigned to an Insight entity.
• Updated documentation describing how to set up Anaconda.

v 1.1.1

• Improve error message when Insight cannot start Python because of security restrictions.
• Update documentation and update VDL version number in examples.

v 1.1.0

• Additional factory function create_app initializes and configures standard test environment.
• Some performance issues with executing a Python based scenario have been addressed.
• Maximum length of a string in an Index, Series, or DataFrame has been changed from 1,000,000 bytes to 250,000 characters.
• Default name of the temporary Insight working directory has been changed from "insight" to "work_dir/insight".

v 1.0.2

• The functions update and reset_progress have been added to the Insight Python interface.
• Changed Python standard output to unbuffered mode to improve responsiveness of output messages.

Licensing

The Xpress software is governed by the Xpress Shrinkwrap License Agreement. When downloading or using the package, you accept the license terms. After installation, a copy of the Xpress Shrinkwrap License will be stored in the LICENSE.txt file in the site-packages/xpressinsight-*.dist-info directory. In Anaconda, a copy of the license file will be stored in the pkgs/xpressinsight-*/info/licenses directory.

"Python" is a registered trademark of the Python Software Foundation. "FICO" is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and may be a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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