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The harbouR explorer

Source: vignettes/explorer-app.Rmd
explorer-app.Rmd

hb_run_explorer() launches a Shiny app for working with a SeaTable base without writing any R. Reach for it when you want to see what is in a base; reach for the programmatic API (hb_read_table(), hb_query() and friends) when you want to do something with the data.

The app and its UI dependencies (shiny, bslib, reactable) live in Suggests, so the client itself stays headless. If something is missing, the launcher names it.

Open something

You can try the app right now with no SeaTable account and no network:

harbouR::hb_run_explorer()

Then choose Use the example base in the Source panel. It loads a bundled .dtable holding one column of every type harbouR supports, so every panel has something to show.

The Source panel takes three kinds of input:

  • A .dtable file. Drop in a SeaTable export and work entirely offline. Nothing leaves your machine.
  • A server. A URL and an API token. The token field is never pre-filled from your environment, because a value passed to a password input is written into the page’s HTML.
  • The example base, above.

You can also hand the app something you already have:

harbouR::hb_run_explorer(harbouR::hb_read_dtable("my-base.dtable"))
harbouR::hb_run_explorer(harbouR::hb_client())

The panels

The left rail lists every table in the base. Under each name is a band of coloured segments - one per column, coloured by what kind of thing the column holds. It is there so you can see the shape of a sixty-column table before you open it: a table that is mostly measurements looks different from one that is mostly text.

  • Data. The table as a tibble, searchable and filterable. List-valued cells - attachments, multi-selects - are joined for display, because a cell shows one value. Set how many rows to read.
  • Schema. Every column, the SeaTable type it holds, the R type harbouR reads it as, its four-character key, and whether it can be written. The colours match the bands in the rail.
  • Query. A SeaTable SQL console. It needs a server: a .dtable is a file, not a database, and the panel says so rather than failing.
  • Export. Download the base as .dtable, as an Excel workbook, or as zipped CSVs - or just the table you are looking at, as one CSV. The .dtable keeps everything; the spreadsheet formats flatten whatever a cell cannot hold, which the app tells you about.

Colour

The palette is the package logo’s, which is viridis: colourblind-safe and perceptually uniform. Column types are grouped into families - text, quantity, time, choice, attachment, relationship, and the ones SeaTable maintains itself - and each family keeps its colour everywhere in the app, so the rail and the schema table read as one system.

Next steps