Workspaces

What is a workspace?

Workspaces are like project folders, consisting of a research environment and a repository. They allow you to organise your work and share it with others. Using Git, you can push and pull changes between the research environment and the repository.

Accessing your workspaces

After you log in to the SigTech platform, your accessible workspaces are displayed:

To create a new workspace, click + Create new workspace. The New workspace screen is displayed:

Once you’ve created the workspace, you become the owner of it.

Note: only owners of the workspace can add or modify the users that can access it.

Add users

The owner of the workspace needs to add users and assign them the relevant access before they can take part in collaborative work.

  1. To add a user or a user group, select your workspace, then click Settings:

2. The Workspace settings screen is displayed:

3. Click the Workspace permission dropdown to select a user, or user group.

4. Assign either read or write access to the new user.

The workspace is displayed as an option for the assigned user in their WORKSPACES area.

Workspace layout

Each workspace has three pathways:

  • Repository

  • Custom Data

  • Settings

Repository

The repository is the .git/ folder inside a workspace, acting as an interface between you and your colleagues. It allows you to share files when collaborating on the same project and records all the changes made to those files. Yet even when not collaborating, the repository can be used to back up your work and track changes made to it.

There are three ways to add a file to the repository:

  • Creating a file with the create file icon in the repository

  • Uploading a file with the upload icon in the repository

  • Pushing a file from your research environment to the repository via Git

You can move files between your workspace’s research environment and its repository to ensure:

  • Files are backed up

  • Version control is enabled

  • Collaboration is possible

When working on a file within your research environment, any changes can be pushed via Git into your repository.

Important: push frequently to avoid losing work.

Repository history

A commit is a change made to a file within the research environment and pushed into the repository via the Git extension. The repository history provides a record of all the commits made to the files within the repository.

When collaborating on the platform, changes made to the repository by your colleagues can be pulled into your research environment using Git.

To deploy a strategy you will need to push it via Git into your repository.

Learn more: Strategy deployment.

Custom data

Custom data can be uploaded via the workspace:

Once uploaded, the open_file function can be used to access this data. In the following example, we adopt the file name "dummy_data.csv".

Note: to run the following code block, change the file name to match the name of the file you have uploaded.

from sigtech import platform_tools
import pandas as pd

# assuming the file name is dummy_data.csv
df = pd.read_csv(platform_tools.open_file("dummy_data.csv"))

The SigTech user guide contains a wealth of information on working with custom data:

Learn more: uploading custom files, datasets, and schemas, see Data Ingestion API.

Learn more: saving and accessing custom data, see Platform tools.

Learn more: extracting data from your jobs in Production, see Data Extraction API.

Settings

Within the Workspace settings screen you can:

  • Name a workspace

  • Describe a workspace

  • Download a workspace

  • Archive a workspace

  • Set permissions for collaborative working

Hiding the workspaces sidebar

To hide the workspaces menu and expand the notebook, use the green arrow icon at the top of the sidebar.

Using Git

Users that have access to a workspace use the Git extension to publish work to the workspace. Other users will then need to retrieve these changes to view them.

Learn more: Git

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