Data Explorer: Display column labels for R columns

[jmcphers]

You can add a label attribute to columns in an R data frame. This is helpful to provide a description of the column that's more verbose than the name you use in code.

df_test <- data.frame(x = 1)
attr(df_test$x, "label") <- "x label"
View(df_test)

In RStudio, this name gets displayed in column header:

But you can't see it in Positron.

(originally requested via https://github.com/posit-dev/positron-beta/discussions/113#discussioncomment-9147231)

[jthomasmock]

Putting this into the future, we've prioritized column-type over custom labels. I would like to see if others are interested in this. Perhaps we can mockup using labels as an alternative OR how labels + type would work.

One thought we had internally was we could probably replace the column type with the custom variable label from the dataframe.

[jsonbecker]

I think type is important, universal, and should be always present.

I sort of think of labels as an anti-pattern, personally, encouraging the maintenance of non-human readable variable names.

[jthomasmock]

I think type is important, universal, and should be always present.

I sort of think of labels as an anti-pattern, personally, encouraging the maintenance of non-human readable variable names.

Yes, understood! There's also some inconsistency with them round-tripping across various dataframe implementations.

[strengejacke]

If I see right, currently types are shown in the left column. So there would be additionally place for labels, similar to RStudio, and then you have both types and labels.

[dfalbel]

Also mentioned here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/discussions/3773#discussion-6886419 and here https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/discussions/3686#discussion-6872791