RStudio Connect fileInput widget for parameterized reports is still broken

cole · July 22, 2020, 1:36am

So sorry for the trouble here. Unfortunately, I believe that this is still broken and does not have a solution yet.

Did any of the workarounds or solutions proposed here seem amenable to you?

Parametized Rmarkdown with fileinput on Rstudio Connect New Posit Connect

Hi @Rodrigue Thanks for opening this!! We had another customer raise this issue somewhat recently as well. It is unclear that this should ever have worked, since the place that this file is written to is destroyed almost immediately. It may have been a change to Connect's execution environment that enforces the "quickness" for the destruction since that last thread, though. We are tracking internally a way to support this functionality better, and will definitely add your vote! A few possible workarounds in the short term are below. Would any of these work within your organization? Have a location where users can upload files that makes these files accessible over a file share or URL. …

In particular, my latest meanderings lead me to imagine a workflow like the following:

upload file to Shiny app
Shiny app pins the file
Shiny app renders an Rmd pointing to this pin
Shiny app redirects user to the rendered Rmd

There are some tricky bits of this workflow (namely, how to get the Rmd to point at the pin, how to give the user access to the report, etc.), but I am inclined to try a little prototype if that workflow would be helpful!