Dynamic naming of viewofs?

Community Help
1

Is there a way to achieve something like this? The following code throws the error Assigning to rvalue. I’m working in a Quarto document.

function test(name){

   viewof name = Inputs.checkbox(
     ["test1", "test2"]
   )

}

test("checkbox_name")
2

No, viewof can only be used as prefix to a cell name when declaring or referencing a cell. What is your use case?

1 Like
4

Thanks Mootari.

The use case is that at my work when we receive a new dataset, my colleagues like it when I quickly provide some interactive bar charts and histograms for exploration. The format for these visualizations is generally:

  • A picklist to select the variable of interest;
  • Some checkboxes to filter by cohort or some other grouping variable;
  • The resulting chart.

Reminder that I’m working in a Quarto document.

I usually create a few of these plots, each corresponding to a different group of variables (for example maybe one for exploring baseline covariates, another for exploring outcome values, etc). Since I find myself doing this so often, I thought it would be nice to have a function that generates all 3 of these pieces (the picklist, checkboxes, and chart) simultaneously for a particular input dataset, rather than needing to manually define the new viewofs and modify the code to filter the plotted dataset based on the values of those viewofs.

5

You can’t declare variable names dynamically in JavaScript. The closest thing you could do is something like this:

function newCheckbox() {
  return Inputs.checkbox(["test1", "test2"]);
}

viewof checkbox_name = newCheckbox()

If you want to declare a set of inputs, which you could also wrap in a helper factory function as above, see Inputs.form: