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cheetahR

cheetahR is an R package that brings the power of Cheetah Grid to R. Designed for speed and efficiency, cheetahR will allow you to render millions of rows in just a few milliseconds, making it an excellent alternative to reactable and other R table widgets. The goal of cheetahR is to wrap the JavaScript functions of Cheetah Grid and make them readily available for R users, providing a seamless and high-performance table widget for R applications.

Features

  • Ultra-fast rendering of large datasets.
  • Lightweight and efficient memory usage.
  • Customizable styling and formatting.
  • Smooth scrolling and interaction.
  • Seamless integration with R and Shiny.

Installation

You can install cheetahR from GitHub:

pak::pak("cynkra/cheetahR")

Getting Started

So far, cheetah() is available to render a dataframe in R

library(cheetahR)

# Render table
cheetah(iris)

# Change some feature of some columns in the data
cheetah(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = column_def(name = "Sepal_Length"),
    Sepal.Width = column_def(name = "Sepal_Width", width = 100)
  )
)

API Integration

cheetahR is compatible with Shiny, allowing for dynamic and interactive tables in web applications. Although still a work in progress.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you’d like to help improve cheetahR, feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests.

Software Pre-requiste

To contribute to this project, some software installations are required, such as npm, node, and packer. Please follow the slides attached to help you get started pre-requisites. Click here to install packer.

When you are in the project, do the following:

packer::npm_install()
# Change the code and then rebundle
packer::bundle("development") # For developement mode
packer::bundle() # For production. Defaut!

You may as well bundle for dev using packer::bundle_dev() when in developer mode and when ready for production use packer::bundle_prod(). You may also consider watch() which watches for changes in the srcjs and rebuilds if necessary, equivalent to ⁠npm run watch⁠.

Debugging steps

  1. Once you run a function, for instance, cheetah(iris), open the viewer on a web browser window (preferably Chrome as it is used to illustrate the action in this step). Note! Other browser pages may differ.
  2. Right-click on the widget and navigate to the “inspect” option on the drop-down menu widget opened on the browser
  3. At the top, where the tabs are displayed, navigate to the “Sources” tab. Open from the sidepanel “cheetahr/srcjs/widgets/cheetah.js” script Inspector tabs are opened
  4. Once the “cheetah.js” is opened on the main panel. You can set a breakpoint on any line number of the script and reload the page. The breakpoint is shown

Acknowledgments

This package is built on top of the amazing Cheetah Grid JavaScript library.