dataviewer: Interactive Data Viewer with Filter and Code Generation

Description

Launches a Shiny application to explore and filter a data.frame or tibble. If no data is provided, it opens an import panel to load a dataset from either the global environment or the packages.

Usage

dataviewer(..., background = NULL, port = NULL)

Value

If background = TRUE, returns the process ID (character) invisibly. If background = FALSE, returns a Shiny application object.

Arguments

...: One or more data.frame or tibble objects. If none provided, an import UI is shown to load data interactively.
background: Logical. If TRUE, runs the app in a background R process using callr. Requires the callr package. Default is TRUE when dataset(s) are provided, FALSE when no dataset(s) are provided.
port: Integer. Port number for the Shiny app. If NULL, a random available port is used. Default is NULL.

Details

This function provides:

A tab-based interface with data import and viewer options.
Support for multiple datasets in separate tabs.
A checkbox panel to select/deselect columns.
An input for dplyr-compatible filter expressions.
A dynamically generated dplyr code preview.
Metadata display for the variables.

The filtering uses dplyr::filter() and generates user-friendly code to replicate the steps. It also provides copyable R code that includes column selection and filtering logic.

Examples

Run this code

if (interactive()) {
    dataviewer(mtcars) # Opens in RStudio Viewer pane or default web browser
    dataviewer(iris, mtcars) # Opens multiple datasets in separate tabs
    dataviewer() # Opens the "Import Dataset" tab (foreground mode - console will be busy)

    # Run in foreground to enable the "Import Dataset" tab alongside 'mtcars'
    dataviewer(mtcars, background = FALSE)

    # Stop background process
    id <- dataviewer(mtcars, iris)
    stop_dataviewer(id)
}