allow tidyselect for columGroups

[werkstattcodes]

As previously mentioned, wonderful package! thx again.

It would be very convenient if columnGroups would allow selecting columns with tidyselect (contains, starts_with etc). Using the example from the pkg site, something like:

reactable(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Sepal.Width = colDef(name = "Width"),
    Petal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Petal.Width = colDef(name = "Width")
  ),
  columnGroups = list(
    colGroup(name = "Sepal", columns = contains("Sepal"),
    colGroup(name = "Petal", columns = contains("Petal")
  )
)

[glin]

Hi, that's an interesting idea, and it does look convenient. Could you use tidyselect to select columns outside of reactable? I'm totally unfamiliar with tidyselect and just skimmed the vignette at https://tidyselect.r-lib.org/articles/tidyselect.html. But it might be possible to write your own wrapper of reactable() that supports tidyselect syntax for the column groups:

# Wrapper for reactable that supports tidyselect syntax in columnGroups
# Based on https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyselect/vignettes/tidyselect.html
# NOTE: not sure if this is totally correct but it seems to work
reactable <- function(data, columnGroups = NULL, ...) {
  groups <- rlang::enquo(columnGroups)
  groups <- rlang::get_expr(groups)[-1]
  groups <- lapply(groups, function(group) {
    pos <- tidyselect::eval_select(group$columns, data = data)
    group$columns <- names(pos)
    rlang::eval_tidy(group)
  })
  reactable::reactable(data, columnGroups = groups, ...)
}

Then you could use the drop-in reactable() replacement like:

library(reactable)
library(tidyselect)

reactable(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Sepal.Width = colDef(name = "Width"),
    Petal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Petal.Width = colDef(name = "Width")
  ),
  columnGroups = list(
    colGroup(name = "Sepal", columns = contains("Sepal")),
    colGroup(name = "Petal", columns = contains("Petal"))
  )
)

While the syntax is convenient, I don't feel particularly strongly about building it into reactable. For this specific example, you could also use grep() to select columns that contain or start with some pattern like:

reactable(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Sepal.Width = colDef(name = "Width"),
    Petal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Petal.Width = colDef(name = "Width")
  ),
  columnGroups = list(
    colGroup(name = "Sepal", columns = grep("Sepal", names(iris), value = TRUE)),
    colGroup(name = "Petal", columns = grep("^Petal", names(iris), value = TRUE))
  )
)

[MokeEire]

A simple workaround that has helped me is using str_subset() on the column names e.g.

reactable(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Sepal.Width = colDef(name = "Width"),
    Petal.Length = colDef(name = "Length"),
    Petal.Width = colDef(name = "Width")
  ),
  columnGroups = list(
    colGroup(name = "Sepal", columns = str_subset(colnames(iris), "Sepal"),
    colGroup(name = "Petal", columns = str_subset(colnames(iris), "Petal")
  )
)