Question: How to customize controls used in editor module?

[Oliver-Loeffler]

Thanks a lot for this great R package. Its a breeze to work with and it actually works very well. Kudos!
I've got a question. When preparing a data.frame for editing, the UI controls selected for the editor UI are chosen automatically depending on their data type.

There are some cases, where one would like to choose a textAreaInput over the normal textInput. Especially when one would like to memorize line breaks and some kind of formatting, a textAreaInput works better than textInput.

Is there any desired way to configure the editor module accordingly? One could think about to either set an option to define the control type for a specific column to override the defaults (or by adding an attribute).

If not, is a pull request welcome to provide such feature?

[pvictor]

Hi! Thanks for your kind words!
It's an excellent idea and a great feature to add to the package! I could have used it last week 😅

I was thinking at something like a named list of functions to use for each variable, but I'm open to suggestion :

list(
  Sepal.Length = numericInput,
  Sepal.Width = function(...) {
    numericInput(..., min = 0, max = 10)
  },
  Petal.Length = function(...) {
    # safer
    args <- list(...)
    numericInput(
      inputId = args$inputId, 
      label = args$label,
      value = args$value,
      min = 0,
      max = 10
    )
  },
  Species = textAreaInput,
  # # or 
  # Species = function(...) {
  #   textAreaInput(..., rows = 12)
  # }
)

• cover the case where a variable is not present in such a list

I think we'll have to check formals of the input function to avoid error such as Error: unused argument, except if function have the three dots in its args

library(rlang)
funInput <- numericInput
args <- list(inputId = "ID", label = "LABEL", value = 0, dontexist_arg = 42)
if (!"..." %in% fn_fmls_names(funInput)) {
  args <- args[intersect(names(args), fn_fmls_names(funInput))]
}
exec(funInput, !!!args)

Let me know what you think of this or if you see another approach.

Victor

PS: yes PR are very welcom

[Oliver-Loeffler]

Having a named list of functions is indeed a good idea. In the beginning I was just considering by adding an option to toggle the editor behavior overall as with that one could prevent changing the method signature. But this would only solve this problem in a very special way.

Given this, I appreciate the proposed idea. Nevertheless, I'll play around with that and see that I can make a proposal soon.

Thanks for this very fast response! Very cool.