open_item() and open() do not work on remote server

[zhengzheli]

They work fine locally. The situation seems to be similar to that reported here with browseURL. Are these functions using browseURL behind the scenes? In the logs of remote server I get a message similar to below:

Please point your browser to the following url: https://test.sharepoint.com/sites/Test/Shared%20Documents/Test.pdf

As a workaround I was able to use shinyjs

[hongooi73]

Correct, these functions are using browseURL. The online help should indicate this:

open(): Open the item in your browser.

Can you give me more info on your use case? I'm very leery of dragging Shiny in as a dependency, or adding custom JS code.

[zhengzheli]

Thanks for your response. I was originally using it to try and open a file on the document library of a SharePoint site. e.g.

documentLibrary <- sharepointSite$get_drive("Documents")
documentLibrary$open_item(sharepointFullPath)

That didn't seem to work, so I used shinyjs to run the following js:

js_code <- "
shinyjs.browseURL = function(url) {
  window.open(url,'_blank');
}"

However, now I am not using the sharepoint document library but using a onedrive document library instead, which is working well.

documentLibrary <- user$get_drive()
documentLibrary$get_item(path)$open()

So currently don't need this issue to be fixed. Thanks.

[hongooi73]

That's very strange. Sharepoint and Business Onedrive use the same backend, so it should either work with both, or fail with both.

To clarify, are you running your R code on your own machine? Or in a remote session, eg in an Rstudio Cloud workspace?

[zhengzheli]

On a remote session, a Shiny server. But testing on local machine. Actually I haven't tested it lately; it was a while ago, and quite possibly there was something wrong with my earlier test. Thanks for your response.

[hongooi73]

Basically if you're running your code on your local machine, then open() will work. Otherwise, it won't, as base R doesn't know how to open a browser in that case.