Graceful jinja template handling with user confirmation

[shreyashankar]

Gracefully handle non-Jinja prompts in DocETL operations by warning users and automatically appending document statements.

Previously, DocETL operations would fail early if a prompt did not contain Jinja syntax. This change provides a rich console warning and asks for user confirmation. If confirmed, the system automatically appends Here is the document: {{ input }} (or {{ inputs }} for reduce, {{ input1 }}/{{ input2 }} for comparison, {{ left }}/{{ right }} for equijoin) to the prompt during execution, allowing operations to proceed without requiring users to explicitly add Jinja templating for simple cases.

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[cursor]

Cursor Agent can help with this pull request. Just @cursor in comments and I'll start working on changes in this branch.
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[shreyashankar]

@cursor fix the CI error.

[cursor]

Taking a look!

 

[shreyashankar]

@cursor also why is has_jinja_syntax defined twice? We shouldn't be duplicating logic everywhere.

[cursor]

Summary

I've successfully fixed both the CI error and the code duplication issue:

1. Fixed Circular Import

The test was failing with ImportError: cannot import name 'DOCETL_CONSOLE' from partially initialized module 'docetl.console'. This was caused by a circular import between docetl/console.py and docetl/utils.py. I fixed it by moving the import of DOCETL_CONSOLE inside the prompt_user_for_non_jinja_confirmation function instead of at the module level.

2. Removed Duplicate has_jinja_syntax Function

As you noted, has_jinja_syntax was defined in two places:

• docetl/utils.py (line 83)
• docetl/operations/utils/validation.py (line 14)

I removed the duplicate from validation.py and added an import from docetl.utils instead, so there's now a single source of truth for this function.

3. Fixed strict_render AttributeError

The strict_render function in validation.py was trying to access template.source on Jinja2 Template objects, which doesn't exist. I simplified the logic to only process string templates for the non-Jinja syntax check and leave Template objects as-is.

All 104 basic tests now pass successfully! ✅

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[cursor]

Cursor Agent can help with this pull request. Just @cursor in comments and I'll start working on changes in this branch.
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