Quarto Report with repeating sections

[timothy_stark]

Hi. I have wat I think should be a fairly common scenario. Its certainly something we need to solve for creating enterprise reports using Quarto and Connect.

I want to use quarto to create a fairly complex report. At the moment output format isn't important to me and I'm just working with a html report, but at the end I suppose i would ideally have revealjs slides.

My report consists of a summary section and then a repeated section. In the attached example, the repeated section runs once for each of the penguin species.

The repeated section is a combination of text output, text tables, and charts. I want the charts to be plotly charts so i can use tooltips and and the plotly controls to highlights things in a meeting reviewing the report.

I don't want separate reports. I want a single report. I would be fine creating multiple reports and then combining them, but I don't see a way to do that either.

Please see attached example. Any suggestions are appreciated.

---

title: "quarto repeating section question"
format: html
editor: visual

Question

I have a report document that has a repeating section. in the repeating section i want a text table and a chart that repeats. the chart needs to be a plotly chart because i need the interactivity i can't get with a ggplot object.

i can't for the life of me figure out how to make this work!!!

#| label: package-loading-and-get-data

library(tidyverse)
library(gt)
library(ggplot2)
library(plotly)

df <- palmerpenguins::penguins

penguin_list <- unique(df$species)

create_table <- function(df_in) {
  
  t <- select(df, species, sex, body_mass_g, flipper_length_mm)
  
  table <- t |> 
    group_by(species, sex) |> 
    summarize(mass_avg = mean(body_mass_g),
              length_avg = mean(flipper_length_mm),
              .groups= "drop") |> 
    gt()
  
  return(table)
  
}

create_plot <- function(df_in) {
  
  plot <- ggplot(df_in, aes(x = body_mass_g, y = flipper_length_mm)) +
    geom_point(stat = "identity")
  
  plot <- ggplotly(plot)
  
  return(plot)
}

#| label: non-repeating-section

df |> 
  group_by(species) |> 
  summarize(n = n()) |> 
  gt()

#| label: example-without-loop

create_table(df)

create_plot(df)

#| label: with-loop
#| output: asis

plotlist = list()

for (p in penguin_list) {
  
  print(paste0("species: ", p))
  
  loop_df <- df |> 
    dplyr::filter(species == p)
  
  print(create_table(loop_df))
  
  fig <- plot_ly(data = loop_df, x = ~body_mass_g, y = ~flipper_length_mm)
  
  fig
  
  # pl <- create_plot(loop_df)
  # plotlist[[i]] = pl
  # htmltools::html_print(pl)
  
  print("end of loop run")
}

[cderv]

First, please do format your code correctly. That will be easier to read:

FAQ: How to Format R Markdown Source

With Quarto you can include some external .qmd content this way: Quarto - Includes

Otherwise, you need to consider knitr feature with child document. We share an example and links to some docs at: Create tabsets panel from R code
This is to dynamically create tabset but you should be able to adapt to your usage.

Hope it helps