colDef with cell parameter fails to render with reactR 0.6.0

[edelgado-ecdc]

Dear development team,

Thank you for your effort in maintaining one of the best table options for R!

Recently we started a new project and tried to render a table with HTML entities in it - something we've done a fair amount of times. However, when rendering the table, we found out that it simply wouldn't come up. After checking a few things we managed to identify the problem being ReactR 0.6.0 - when running with React 0.5.0 it works.

You can try this example from the reactable documentation:

library(reactable)
data <- MASS::Cars93[1:5, c("Manufacturer", "Model", "Type", "AirBags", "Price")]

reactable(data, columns = list(
    Model = colDef(cell = function(value, index) {
        # Render as a link
        url <- sprintf("https://wikipedia.org/wiki/%s_%s", data[index, "Manufacturer"], value)
        htmltools::tags$a(href = url, target = "_blank", as.character(value))
    }),
    AirBags = colDef(cell = function(value) {
        # Render as an X mark or check mark
        if (value == "None") "\u274c No" else "\u2714\ufe0f Yes"
    }),
    Price = colDef(cell = function(value) {
        # Render as currency
        paste0("$", format(value * 1000, big.mark = ","))
    })
))

Judging at the ReactR changelog there might be a couple of breaking changes with how it handles tags.

I couldn't find any recommendation on the version of reactR to use, but perhaps in the meantime it would be good to limit the version to 0.5.0.

Again, thanks for your effort on this library! :)

[glin]

Yep, this is an issue with reactR 0.6.0. Pin to reactR 0.5.0 until it's fixed in reactR.

There was some discussion at https://github.com/glin/reactable/issues/363#issuecomment-2227650326, but this is a more specifically titled issue, so I'll pin this one.

The reactR issue is https://github.com/react-R/reactR/issues/86, so you can subscribe to that for updates.

[azimov]

I am experiencing this issue with reactR but only on posit connect hosted platforms, not on mac or windows

[glin]

@azimov Yes, the bug affects Posit Connect as well, so you can install the older reactR 0.5.0 for now.

As a general update, I also dug into the bug a bit and suggested a fix at https://github.com/react-R/reactR/pull/89

One more workaround option would be to install the patch from my reactR fork via remotes::install_github("glin/reactR"), but you might prefer using the reactR 0.5.0 version on CRAN still.

[glin]

Should be fixed now with the latest release of reactR on CRAN! Update reactR to 0.6.1 and see if that fixes things.