Creating Quarto documents programmatically

[lorenzoFabbri]

I would like to create Quarto documents programmatically:

1. I call the function create_document passing as input just the path to a yaml file containing the DOI (a alphanumeric string) and a DAG (which is just a string separated by new lines here).
2. This functions should ideally create a new Quarto document in a given directory.
3. The Quarto document should be parametrised (both YAML and content) using information resulting from the call to create_document.

The YAML currently looks like this:

---
title: "Some title"
date: 09/01/2014
doi: doi_from_file
---

The body of the document has the following structure:

## Important links

- [Article](https://doi.org/{{< meta doi >}})

## DAG

dag <- dagitty::dagitty(dag_from_file)
tidy_dag <- ggdag::tidy_dagitty(dag)

ggdag::ggdag_status(tidy_dag) +
  ggdag::theme_dag()

It is important to note that doi_from_file and dag_from_file result from the call to create_document. Is there a way to achieve this?

[mcanouil]

Quarto documents are simple flat text files.

Simply write the file with whatever you like in R.

cat(sprintf(
'---
title: "Some title"
date: 09/01/2014
doi: %s
---

## Important links

- [Article](https://doi.org/{{< meta doi >}})

## DAG

```{r}
dag <- dagitty::dagitty(%s)
tidy_dag <- ggdag::tidy_dagitty(dag)

ggdag::ggdag_status(tidy_dag) +
  ggdag::theme_dag()
```
',
doi_from_file,
dag_from_file
), file = 'index.qmd')

quarto::quarto_render("index.qmd")

Or create a template document that you can reuse (see https://quarto.org/docs/computations/parameters.html):

---
params:
  doi: none
  dag: none
title: "Some title"
date: 09/01/2014
doi: '{{< meta params.doi >}}'
---

## Important links

- [Article](https://doi.org/{{< meta doi >}})

## DAG

```{r}
if (!params[["dag"]] %in% "none") {
  dag <- dagitty::dagitty(params[["dag"]])
  tidy_dag <- ggdag::tidy_dagitty(dag)

  ggdag::ggdag_status(tidy_dag) +
    ggdag::theme_dag()
}
```

[mcanouil]

Additionally, see https://quarto-dev.github.io/quarto-r/ for rendering from R using the R wrapper package.