Building R Reports with Posit Team

Posit Solutions Engineering (Lisa Anders)

Posit, PBC

Building R Reports with Posit Team

“Illustration from Hadley Wickham’s talk”The Joy of Functional Programming (for Data Science).” by Allison Horst

• RMarkdowns
• Parameterization
• Pretty emails with Blastula
• Custom landing pages with connectwidgets
• Dashboards with flexdashboard
• The latest and greatest: Quarto

What makes a good report?

Ideas?

What makes a good report?

Ideas?

• Reproduceable

• Easy to share

• Pretty

Building reports programmatically is powerful!

This is where building reports programmatically is so powerful, so you can take advantage of version control through systems like Git, and sharing options through Posit Connect can be so powerful. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg for all the beautiful packages and modules that can be used!

Different report options

RMarkdown - Fully reproducible notebooks that weave together narrative text and code to produce formatted outputs.

Quarto - A new open-source scientific and technical publishing system that works with R, Python, Julia, Javascript, and many other languages.

Jupyter - Web application for sharing computational documents. (Not covered in today’s talk)

RMarkdowns

RMarkdown - Fully reproducible notebooks that weave together narrative text and code to produce formatted outputs.

RMarkdown documents are:

• Easily accessible and testable to ensure accurate results every time
• Easily version controlled
• Easy to use with ample documentation and examples

Put in the chat how long you’ve been working with RMarkdown documents

RMarkdowns

General example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

RMarkdowns: Favorite packages

Blastula - Make it easy to send great looking HTML emails.

Flexdashboard - Flexible and easy to specify row and column-based layouts. Components are intelligently re-sized to fill the browser and adapted for display on mobile devices.

Connectwidgets - Query a Connect server for a subset of your existing content items, then organize them within htmlwidget components in an R Markdown document or Shiny application. (Not covered in today’s talk)

RMarkdowns: Parameterization

Parameterized Rmarkdown example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

When deploying the app it will need to have the source code included so that users can change the input parameter and re-render.

Parameterizing your rmarkdown lets you do a lot of cool things, like automating the generation of hundreds of similar reports using different parameters, or allowing users to enter their own parameters and generate a report specific to what they need.

RMarkdowns: Sending emails with Blastula

Before:

Blastula example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

RMarkdowns: Sending emails with Blastula

After:

Blastula example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

RMarkdowns: Interactive dashboards with Flexdashboard

Flexdashboard - Flexible and easy to specify row and column-based layouts. Components are intelligently re-sized to fill the browser and adapted for display on mobile devices.

Flexdashboard example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

Quarto

quarto - A new open-source scientific and technical publishing system that works with R, Python, Julia, Javascript, and many other languages.

Quarto and RMarkdown work similarly, however Quarto was developed to be language agnostic and applied all the learnings from the development of RMarkdown.

Same as with RMarkdowns, Quarto is:

• Easily accessible and testable to ensure accurate results every time
• Easily version controlled
• Easy to use with ample documentation and examples

Quarto documents

General example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

Quarto presentations

Code blocks can also be included in Quarto presentations:

Figure 1: Temperature and ozone level.

Quarto: Interactive images with Lightbox

Quarto with Python and lightbox example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL

What if I’m coming from interactive reports, like Shiny?

Pros:

• Better performance because everything is pre-calculated

• Ecosystem of packages for displaying interactive content within static documents

Cons:

• Computations won’t be happening real-time

  • Connect can schedule down to the minute - sometimes that can get you close enough to “real-time”

• Less dynamic options

Blending static and interactive pieces of content can open up new workflows and reporting possibilities

Complex workflows

Complex workflows

tidymodels - The tidymodels framework is a collection of packages for modeling and machine learning using tidyverse principles.

vetiver - Vetiver provides fluent tooling to version, deploy, and monitor a trained model.

pins - The pins package publishes data, models, and other R objects, making it easy to share them across projects and with your colleagues.

plumber APIs - Plumber allows you to create a web API by merely decorating your existing R source code with roxygen2-like comments.

tidymodels https://www.tidymodels.org/, vetiver https://vetiver.rstudio.com/, pins https://pins.rstudio.com/, plumber https://www.rplumber.io/

Complex workflows

pins - The pins package publishes data, models, and other R objects, making it easy to share them across projects and with your colleagues.

Pin example:

• Code URL
• Developer URL for pinned dataset
• Developer URL for document refreshing the pin
• Developer URL for app

Where to go from here?

• Explore all the content options deployable to Connect as well as examples: Connect User Guide

• R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

• Awesome List for RMarkdown tips and tricks

• Awesome List for Quarto tips and tricks

Happy Reporting!

Backup

Tools in the toolbox

RMarkdown - Fully reproducible notebooks that weave together narrative text and code to produce formatted outputs.

Blastula - Make it easy to send great looking HTML emails.

quarto - A new open-source scientific and technical publishing system that works with R, Python, Julia, Javascript, and many other languages.

Jupyter - Web application for sharing computational documents.