Plotly: How to inspect the basic figure structure (version 4)

Question

For older versions of plotly, for example in Jupyterlab, you could simply run figure to inspect the basics of your figure like this:

Ouput:

{'data': [{'marker': {'color': 'red', 'size': '10', 'symbol': 104},
   'mode': 'markers+lines',
   'name': '1st Trace',
   'text': ['one', 'two', 'three'],
   'type': 'scatter',
   'x': [1, 2, 3],
   'y': [4, 5, 6]}],
 'layout': {'title': 'First Plot',
  'xaxis': {'title': 'x1'},
  'yaxis': {'title': 'x2'}}}

Code for versions prior to V4:

import plotly.plotly as py
import plotly.graph_objs as go

trace1 = go.Scatter(x=[1,2,3], y=[4,5,6], marker={'color': 'red', 'symbol': 104, 'size': "10"},
                    mode="markers+lines",  text=["one","two","three"], name='1st Trace')

data=go.Data([trace1])
layout=go.Layout(title="First Plot", xaxis={'title':'x1'}, yaxis={'title':'x2'})
figure=go.Figure(data=data,layout=layout)
#py.iplot(figure, filename='pyguide_1')
figure

If you do the same thing now with a similar setup, the same approach will not produce the figure basics, but rather plot the figure itself:

Code:

import pandas as pd
import plotly.graph_objects as go

trace1 = go.Scatter(x=[1,2,3], y=[4,5,6], marker={'color': 'red', 'symbol': 104},
                    mode="markers+lines",  text=["one","two","three"], name='1st Trace')  

figure = go.Figure(data=trace1)  

figure

Output:

In many ways this is similar to how you for example would build and plot a figure with ggplot in R. And since plotly is available for both R and Python I thinks this makes sense after all. But I'd really like to know how to access that basic setup.

What I've tried:

I think this change is due to the fact that figure is now a plotly.graph_objs._figure.Figure and used to be a dictionary(?). So figure['data'] and figure['layout'] are still dicts with necessary and interesting content:

Output from figure['data']

(Scatter({
     'marker': {'color': 'red', 'symbol': 104},
     'mode': 'markers+lines',
     'name': '1st Trace',
     'text': [one, two, three],
     'x': [1, 2, 3],
     'y': [4, 5, 6]
 }),)

Output from figure['layout']

Layout({
    'template': '...'
})

And of course options such as help(figure) and dir(figure) are helpful, but produces a very different output.

Answer 1

I just found out that 'forgetting' the brackets for figure.show() will give me exactly what I'm looking for. So with a setup similar to the code in the question and with plotly V4, simply running figure.show will give you this:

Output:

<bound method BaseFigure.show of Figure({
    'data': [{'marker': {'color': 'red', 'symbol': 104},
              'mode': 'markers+lines',
              'name': '1st Trace',
              'text': [one, two, three],
              'type': 'scatter',
              'x': [1, 2, 3],
              'y': [4, 5, 6]}],
    'layout': {'template': '...'}
})>

Code:

import pandas as pd
import plotly.graph_objects as go

trace1 = go.Scatter(x=[1,2,3], y=[4,5,6], marker={'color': 'red', 'symbol': 104},
                    mode="markers+lines",  text=["one","two","three"], name='1st Trace')  

figure = go.Figure(data=trace1)  

figure.show