[Question]: When to show "Report Previewer" tab?

[gogonzo]

What is your question?

Teal adds "Report Previewer" only when it is needed, currently on main it is a following condition:

• When any of the module(s) have a reporter argument in the formals

With the new design, none of none of the teal_module(s) has report argument as it is not needed. Now, teal_module returns reactive containing teal_data. This indicates that module is reportable. This means that in teal we need to detect whether any of the module returns a reactive containing teal_data. The point of the problem is that we DON'T CALL A MODULE UNTIL ITS TAB IS CLICKED. It means that "Report Previewer" might not been shown until the first "reportable" module is clicked.

I think we need a better idea how to handle this. Here is some primitive mockup:

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[donyunardi]

Initial thoughts:

• crawl through the code returned by module().
  If we're consistent with the naming convention, maybe we can crawl through the returned module() code before being evaluated and look for specific pattern. I'm not too keen on this because it relies on how user write their custom module but just want to mention it.

• Leave the decision to show the "Report Previewer" module to user.

    app <- init() |> show_report_previewer(TRUE)

  The default is to always show the report previewer. If none of the modules is reportable, then this module will show no cards. We can then encourage user to hide it by setting it to FALSE.

• Maybe it's okay that "Report Previewer" is not shown in the beginning until there is something to preview.

Will think some more.

[gogonzo]

• crawl through the code returned by module().
  If we're consistent with the naming convention, maybe we can crawl through the returned module() code before being evaluated and look for specific pattern. I'm not too keen on this because it relies on how user write their custom module but just want to mention it.

Not that easy and robust naming convention is something we can follow, not module-developers out there. We would have to parse for the possible return in the middle of the moduleServer code. Also if there is a function call at the end which returns modified teal_report then it will be very hard to parse recursively. Static code analysis doesn't guarantee anything.

• Leave the decision to show the "Report Previewer" module to user.
  app <- init() |> show_report_previewer(TRUE)

App developer to decide whether to hide previewer when it is not needed?

The default is to always show the report previewer. If none of the modules is reportable, then this module will show no cards. We can then encourage user to hide it by setting it to FALSE.

• Maybe it's okay that "Report Previewer" is not shown in the beginning until there is something to preview.

App user will loose the chance to load a report when no cards added.

[donyunardi]

Just to update on this, we decided to always show the reporter previewer.
If user doesn't want the reporter tab, they can set init(reporter = NULL).