How to implement custom notifications

If you would like to implement custom notifications that include a link to Data Docs, you can access the Data Docs URL for the respective validation results page from your Data Context after a validation run following the steps below. This will work to get the URLs for any type of Data Docs site setup, e.g. S3 or local setup.

  1. First, this is the standard boilerplate to load a Data Context and run validation on a Batch:

    import great_expectations as gx
    
    # Load the Data Context
    context = gx.data_context.DataContext()
    
    # The batch_kwargs will differ depending on the type of Datasource,
    # see the docs for help
    batch_kwargs = {'table': 'my_table', 'datasource': 'my_datasource'}
    batch = context.get_batch(batch_kwargs, 'my_suite')
    
    # Run validation on your Batch
    results = context.run_validation_operator(
        "action_list_operator",
        assets_to_validate=[batch],
        run_id='my_run_id')
    
  2. Next, get the list of IDs of the validation results. results is a list that might have multiple elements if you validate multiple Batches, so we’ll have to iterate over it. In this example, we’ll just grab the only element:

    validation_ids = [res for res in results['run_results']]
    validation_id = validation_ids[0]
    
  3. Finally, use the validation_id as an argument to the Data Context’s get_docs_sites_urls() method, and get the right element from the resulting list to access its site_url:

    url_dicts = context.get_docs_sites_urls(resource_identifier=validation_id)
    # The method returns a list of dictionaries like so:
    # [{'site_name': 'local_site',
    #  'site_url': 'file://validations/my_suite/my_run_id/20200811T181225.859901Z/123456.html'}]
    
    # The list will have multiple elements if you have multiple sites set up, e.g.
    # S3 and a local site. In this example, we'll just grab the only element again:
    validation_site_url = url_dicts[0]['site_url']
    
  4. You can now include validation_site_url as a link in your custom notifications, e.g. in an email, which will allow users to jump straight to the relevant validation results page.