Render with Parameters GUI (similar to .Rmd Knit with Parameters)

[DOH-TJB0303]

Description

My team and a lot of other public health agencies have built and utilize pre-built .Rmd reporting templates that allow end-users to quickly and easily explore data using the Knit with Parameters GUI available in .Rmd files. It would be great this this GUI functionality could be integrated within Quarto (as it was with R Markdown).

Although parameters can be specified through quarto::render() and other knitting functions, the GUI is a relied upon tool to support no/low-code users which may not be confident/comfortable to edit pre-built code templates (but are able to select options they want to look at).

If implemented, the GUI would remove a major barrier to transitioning many of our reporting templates from .Rmd to .Qmd, thank you!

[mcanouil]

This repository is about Quarto CLI not editors.

An example using Quarto CLI using parameters (see https://quarto.org/docs/computations/parameters.html):

---
title: "Lipsum"
params:
  amazing-content: "This is amazing content"
engine: knitr
---

`{r} params[["amazing-content"]]`

quarto render index.qmd --execute-param "amazing-content:actually not really"

or providing parameters as a YAML file

amazing-content: "Yes it is amazing"

quarto render index.qmd --execute-params params.yml

For feature request regarding:

• RStudio: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio
• VSCode Quarto extension: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto.

[cderv]

Just to be thorough regarding the R Markdown ecosystem, the "the Knit with Parameters GUI available in .Rmd files" is not an IDE thing. This is possible at command line using rmarkdown::render("MyDocument.Rmd", params = "ask")
Docs at: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/params-knit.html#the-interactive-user-interface

The interface is built with Shiny miniui - rmarkdown::render() does know how to run a shiny app, and run it before calling rmarkdown::render(). This is possible because it is all R from start to finish

With quarto it is a bit different, and less integrated, but it is possible to do the same:

• Build a UI that would run to get user input
• Call a rendering with quarto using parameters

I don't know if we'll add that in quarto - maybe quarto R package could have something like that but there is no plan for it.

Any webapp would work to get input, serialize to YAML and pass it to Quarto render. Taking into account specificity of parameters for Quarto (no R object can be passed except being serialize - e.g. you can't pass a data.Frame as parameter).

Anyhow, current solution is to develop its own interface IMO to wrap call to Quarto.

[DOH-TJB0303]

Thanks @cderv for that helpful explanation, and exploring the feasibility of such a feature -- I know it would be really valuable for a lot of folks that I work and collaborate with.

I had recently transitioned this issue over to the RStudio IDE GitHub (rstudio/rstudio#13937), but it sounds like I should transition it again over to the Quarto R package repository: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-r.