How to I attract help to my tricky Shiny and R Markdown problem? - Using paramterized Rmarkdowns and ShinyR apps/ Interactive markdown files

[lambjir]

I have beeen trying for about 10 days to solve the issues I am having, i have posted multiple topics but with no answers. Is anyone prepared to help me with troubleshooting an app to produce params() rmarkdown reports using an app?

Thankyou in advance.

[EconomiCurtis]

This feels more like a meta "How do I get people to help me with my tricky coding problem", so I'm going to move it there, and retitle it.

In my experience, I feel there's two big things you need to do to attract help to solve your problem. That's true whether your post your question here, github issues, stack overflow, or ask your colleagues or in a grad office.

1. Use a reprex
2. Make it minimal

On 1. A reproducible example is just the gold standard to get your problem in the hands of others. For many problems like this one, folks are more likely to help if they are able to replicate your error messages in as close to your environment as possible.
Unless your issue is trivially easy to see & resolve via code inspection - which is rare with shiny app issues and with the types of problems experienced folks have - people are only left guessing, which often isn't helpful to you. For questions like "why is my coding breaking" or "why is my code not doing what I think it should be doing", there's no better tool than a reprex.

For shiny apps, I'm seeing an increasing number of successes with people creating their reprex in rstudio.cloud, since that'll create a project you can share via URL, recreating the set of files needed to recreate your issue.

On 2, make it minimal, realize that folks here and other help forums are volunteers, they have limited time and many questions they could help with. Even if you have a reprex, if it's hundreds of lines of hard to understand code, people may still struggle to diagnose the issue, or they may just feel it's too much effort to even start diving in. Removing any extraneous code helps folks focus on the core issue you'd like help with.

In case you hadn't seen this, Barret and others organized these thoughts into a handy guide:

Shiny debugging and reprex guide

Shiny issues can be challenging to resolve relative to other problems with your code or statistical methods. Shiny apps are often large, complex projects with interacting files. When seeking help from others it is considered polite to: First, do your best to work through RStudio's debugging tools to diagnose your issue on your own. Often those shiny logs and tracebacks are useful to others trying to help out. Second, strive to minimize the effort required to replicate your issue. You can do this with a reproducible example ("reprex"). Shiny Debugging Errors in Shiny code can be difficult to track down. If you don't know where your problem is coming from, you can track it down with some o…

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lambjir's unanswered questions:

Where do I save the Rmd file I am generating with a Shiny R App

I have an app to aloter the params argument in an Rmd file and then download said rmd file using the shiny app. Where do I save the rmd file and how do I tell shiny where to look? This is my app: setwd("C:/Users/JL16/Documents/Apps/qc-app") library(shiny) library(markdown) ui = fluidPage( textInput("year", "Enter Year"), downloadButton("report", "Generate report") ) server <- function(input, output, session) { output$report <- downloadHandler( filename = "report.html", content = function(file) { params <- list(year = input$year) rmarkdown::render("report.Rmd", output_file = file, params = par…

Downloading parameterized rmd using shinyR normalizePath error

I am using the shiny app: setwd("XXXXX") library(shiny) library(markdown) ui = fluidPage( textInput("year", "Enter Year"), downloadButton("report", "Generate report") ) server = function(input, output) { output$report <- downloadHandler( filename = "report.html", content = function(file) { dir.exists tempReport <- file.path(tempdir(), "report.Rmd") file.copy("report.Rmd", tempReport, overwrite = TRUE) params <- list(year = input$year) rmarkdown::render(tempReport, output_file = file, params = params, envir = new.env(parent = globalenv()) ) …

Shiny R and Rmd

I am trying to have an input in shinyR change a params in an .rmd file. The rmd is saved in the www folder as report.rmd. First post so apologies if it isn't formatted properly. title: "report" output: html_document params: n: NA TripID<-params$n TripID Using the App: shinyApp( ui = fluidPage( textInput("tripid", "Enter Trip"), downloadButton("report", "Generate report") ), server = function(input, output) { output$report <- downloadHandler( filename = "report.html", content = function(file) { tempReport <- file.path(tempdir(), "report.Rmd") file.copy("report.Rmd", tempReport, overwrite = TRUE) params <- list(n = input$tripid) rmarkdo…

[lambjir]

Thanks for the help. I will try and recreate an easy to create reproducable example and repost witha clearer question. Thanks James