Automated reporting in a Quarto blog

[VirginiaWoloshen]

Currently, I've been using a parameterized quarto template to generate reports. I pass the parameter to

quarto_render(input = "template.qmd", execute_params = list(param1 = param_example), output_file = paste("./", param_example, "_report.html", sep = ""))

but this renders the html file which is fine for one off events but I would like to auto-generate a blog post on a Quarto blog with this. Can the output_file be an .qmd file (required for blog post listings) or is there some way for me to do this dynamically?

[mcanouil]

I am not sure to follow, you want to create a Quarto document from a Quarto document?
Could you explain a bit more your use case?

[VirginiaWoloshen]

mainly it would be for automated reporting. We have weekly data that is essentially reported in the same format so it would be nice to automatically generate these. Having it in a blog format would be nice so the team can view, search old reports and subscribe. I think I found a way using writeLines which works for now. I have written a qmd document as a template that is parameterized so all I need to do is change that one parameter (currently using str_replace) then writeLines to posts/

[mcanouil]

Then no rendering needed at all, except the blog part.
I'll make a reproducible demo later.

[mcanouil]

Here a reproducible example (this is not the only way):

1. Create a website

   quarto create-project --type website:blog

2. Create a template file _template-report.qmd

   ---
   categories: [reports]
   ---
   
   This is a post with executable code.
   
   ```{r}
   my_data <- get(data(list = params[["data"]]))
   knitr::kable(head(my_data))
   ```
   

3. Create an R function to fills the YAML, e.g., title, author, date, and params

   create_report_post <- function(title, author, date, data, blog_dir = "posts") {
     post_dir <- gsub("-+", "-", gsub("[[:punct:]⁠ ]+", "-", tolower(title)))
     post_dir <- gsub("^-|-$", "", post_dir)
     dir.create(file.path(blog_dir, post_dir))
     writeLines(
       text = c(
         "---",
         yaml::as.yaml(
           list(
             title = title,
             author = author,
             date = date,
             params = list(
               data = data
             )
           )
         ),
         readLines("_template-report.qmd")[-1]
       ),
       con = file.path(blog_dir, post_dir, "index.qmd")
     )
   }

4. Generate a new post and render the website:

   create_report_post(
     title = "April Report",
     author = "Firstname Lastname",
     date = format(Sys.Date(), "%Y-%m-%d"),
     data = "mtcars"
   )
   quarto::quarto_render(as_job = FALSE)