Documentation Access

C3 AI provides two venues to access their documentation.

  • Developer Portal documentation website: https://developer.c3.ai/documentation.
  • Static Console documentation: This can be accessed by:
    • Selecting the Help > Documentation menu.
    • Running the command 'c3ShowType(<TypeOfInterest>)', or
    • A c3-connected Jupyter Python notebook by running 'help(c3.<TypeOfInterest>)'.

Developer Portal Documentation

This expansive set of documentation is split into two major sections on the front page. First, is the Featured section which contains several very useful guides. At the time of this writing, they are:

  • Release notes for 7.17
  • Getting Started
  • Administer
  • Security Guide
  • Metrics
  • Time Series
  • Data Lineage
  • Data Science and Machine Learning

Second is the Search bar and results. Here, you can enter any topic or C3 Type and get mostly relevant articles for that Type or topic. Be sure to select the appropriate version from the search bar drop-down to ensure the results correspond to the version of C3 AI Suite version you are using.

For DTI users, the most useful documentation will be the Getting Started Guide. This guide provides a reasonable introduction to the C3 AI suite which users can leverage along with DTI provided examples to prepare for their research on their eventual C3 AI research instance.

For general topics, such as evaluating Metrics, we recommend opening the Getting Started guide and searching for the topic you're interested in either through Ctrl+F (Find) or by inspecting the table of contents. If you can't find exactly what you're looking for, next try typing your topic into the search bar as this may sometimes surface a relevant article. If you still can't find information on the topic you're interested in, open a ticket with the DTI asking for more information by emailing help@c3dti.ai. Describe the topic you think is lacking a description, and we'll either provide an explanation in this training guide somewhere, or prompt C3 AI to augment their documentation.

When looking at type information through the search function, only basic C3 Types will be available. All types you defined yourself in a C3 AI instance will not be available. That said, documentation on the base Types is often very helpful. Each Type entry contains a short description, a list of Types the Type mixes in, the annotations defined on it, and a list of properties and methods along with where those methods came from if they were inherited. Initially, the method descriptions are in a 'collapsed' state, and clicking on a method you're interested in should expand it to provide a description, a definition of the functions signature, and a list of arguments and expected values for those arguments, if necessary. 

Static Console Documentation

If you have access to a running C3 AI instance, several additional documentation sources are available to you. In the upper left a menu labeled 'Help' exposes links to 'Console' command documentation as well as http documentation similar to that hosted on their main documentation website. We've found the DTI official documentation hosted on their website to be better than this documentation.

Finally, documentation for any type can be accessed through the browser console by running the command 'c3ShowType(<TypeOfInterest>)'. This will display a page giving a description of the type, links to the types it inherits, a list of annotations which are declared on it, and a list of functions and properties either unique to that type or inherited through other types. Each property and function is described with a type or call signature along with a description of that property and function.

Jupyter Notebook Documentation

If you're accessing the C3 AI platform through a Python Jupyter notebook, you can pull up the same Type documentation within Jupyter in a similar way as you could with the Static Console. Instead of the 'c3ShowType()' command you'll run 'help(c3.<TypeOfInterest>)' to display the documentation for that type in an output cell (Note the period after "c3"). In our experience the formatting in Jupyter makes it harder to read than the Static Console c3ShowType() output, plus it can be more difficult to search through with your browser's Find command.

Base C3 Types

The C3 AI platform comes with a number of built-in types which are used throughout, and are available in all C3 AI instances. These types all have documentation accessible through the main C3 AI developer documentation here.

Some notable Types include:

Caveats

  • When browsing the searchable C3 AI hosted documentation, be careful that the pages you navigate to are for the right version of C3 AI Suite. By default, all versions are searched and displayed. Use the drop-down menu to select your desired version to avoid duplicate results.
  • Pages generally have URLs like the following: https://developer.c3.ai/docs/7.12.0/type/Persistable. Notice, the presence of the version as '7.12.0'. Sometimes using the search function will bring up links to documentation of other versions. This isn't mentioned explicitly and the often the only clue is the different version in the URL.
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