Live Q&A Session - Ep 3. Scheduling a Quarto Doc (with custom branding) on Posit Connect
Live Q&A Session for the End-to-End Workflow Demo on June 28th *Please note this was the live Q&A portion of the event. You can view the demo recording here: https://youtu.be/V82BBU9ldcM Ep 3. Scheduling a Quarto Doc (with custom branding) on Posit Connect | End-to-end workflows Follow-up links: * Demo recording: https://youtu.be/V82BBU9ldcM * Posit Team: https://posit.co/products/enterprise/team/ * Talk to us directly: https://posit.co/schedule-a-call/?booking_calendar__c=RST_YT_Demo * Follow-along blog post: To be added * Source code for example: To be added * Posit Team demo resources: pos.it/demo-resources
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Pro Community Manager. I hope everybody is having a great Wednesday. Thank you so much for joining us all today for the demo and thank you Ryan for the great demo. I guess we could kick things off by just introducing ourselves over here now that we're in the Q&A portion. I'm Rachel Dempsey. I'm our Pro Community Manager here at Posit and I host a variety of different community events so it's so nice to see you all here.
Ryan, do you want to introduce yourself again? Yeah, so I'm Ryan. I was the guy whose voice you just heard for the last 30 minutes. I'm a Data Science Advisor here at Posit and just really pumped to have this kind of live interactive session where we can answer any questions you had about all that stuff I talked about or any Posit questions, happy to help. And then we're also joined by my colleague Dave and I'll allow him to introduce himself. Hey, I'm Dave Grunwald. I'm a Manager in Solutions Engineering and I'm also here to help answer any of your technical questions around Quarto or otherwise. Looking forward to it.
What does pinning data mean?
So one of the questions that was asked a bit earlier during the demo, which I thought might be helpful to cover is, what exactly does pinning data mean? Yeah, and I can take this one. So pins is something I use all the time. And the way I like to think of it and kind of the way the package is named, pins, I think of it like a sticky note or a piece of paper. You walk into your office and you pin that sticky note or piece of paper to a board on your office. And then your colleagues can walk by, they can see that piece of paper, they can interact with it, they can use that piece of paper.
So it's a great way to take any object you've created in R, that could be a data set like we did today. It could also be a model, any other R object. You can also do this in Python. So definitely if you're a Python developer, you can still pin data. And it allows you to take that data and pin it to a location, a board. That can be Connect, like we did today. It could be another location. And it allows your other, your future self, any of your colleagues to incorporate that pin data set into their workflows.
So rather than, for example, maybe you have a Shiny application, and if you're deploying it to Connect, you might have to kind of include that data with the application, that bundle. But if you use pins, you can just publish just the code and the Shiny application can reach out to that pin and pull it in automatically, so you don't have to kind of attach that data set to the application itself. Yeah, pins is great. It's a really good tool for building out some powerful workflows.
Customized email reports and Blastula
So another question that I see over in YouTube right now is from Darren. And Darren asks, is Blastula still recommended as the package for customized email reports? So with Connect, you can still do that scheduling and you will get an email. But if you want to do that customized kind of whether it's an HTML email or more conditional formatting, that's where Blastula still is our preferred method. But again, whenever you do set up a content that's deployed to Connect, you will get notified when that is rerun. So if you just want to know that your content is available, Connect does that by default. But if you want that more customization, Blastula is a great way to do that.
And just to follow up there as well, I was talking to some of our Quarto engineers, and this is a functionality coming to Quarto very soon. So stay tuned.
Python inline code in Quarto
So one question from earlier that we didn't get to cover yet in the chat was, is there any advancement in allowing Python variables in Quarto marked on text the way R can? So at the moment, we do just support the inline execution with R. Having Python is on the roadmap, but at the current version of Quarto, we just have the inline execution of R code.
Quarto themes and PDF output
A question over on Slido, and thank you, Tim, was, are Quarto themes compatible with PDF output at this time? Yeah, I can start with that question, and Dave, you can certainly add any other color to it. But the great thing about Quarto and creating custom themes is that you can choose how to build that theme for a specific output. So if you want to, for example, for the demo today, I created a simple theme that really was tailored to an HTML output. But if I wanted to, I could create a custom theme specific for a PDF output, or both. So that's kind of like the power of being able to customize your own themes, and it's totally up to you, your choice, your organization.
Only thing I'll add is with PDF, there are some features that won't translate one to one from HTML to PDF. So just be aware that you might see some nuances that emerge, but for the most part, we did try to simplify that as much as possible.
And I see Heather had asked over on YouTube, I saw at the end that the HTML file of the Quarto report would be attached to a scheduled email. Is it possible to have the body of the email include the themed Quarto content? Yeah, I think that's kind of relating back to that Blastula question we were talking about. So if you do want that HTML content, like those plots, those tables that you have inside a Quarto document actually embedded in the email, then you really want to, for right now, consider using our markdown with Blastula. But this functionality is coming very soon to Quarto as well, so stay tuned for that.
Posit Team and Package Manager
One other question I saw in YouTube is, our Org has Workbench and Connect. Is there a benefit to investing in Teams beyond adding Package Manager? Yeah, I can start with that one. So Positeam, again, as a reminder, it's a kind of a bundled offering of our three professional tools. So two of which looks like this user has Workbench and Connect, and there's a third one called Package Manager, which does essentially as its name implies, it helps control, manage, also organize and distribute all those open source R and Python packages your team uses. It also allows you to host any internally developed packages your team's working on.
So I would say from the context of this question, adding Package Manager, it rounds out that team offering. And so that's something important to know. I would suggest talking to your sales representative here at Posit, because in terms of how licensing works, there's actually a major advantage to adding Package Manager to Positeam. But our tools are modular as well. Some teams get a lot of value out of just Connect, some like just Workbench, some like just Package Manager, but they all play very nicely together. And that's why we kind of offer this rounded kind of compiled offering of Positeam.
Quarto vs R Markdown
It looks like there's some questions about comparing Quarto to R Markdown, especially if you're an R developer. So just to reiterate from the YouTube channel comments, there was questions of like, is R Markdown going away? No, we are still supporting R Markdown. That will be continued support. Quarto, I think the advantage there is that there are additional features. It is easier to switch what that output looks like, whether it be a slide or a report, even dynamic content or PDF, Word docs, even Confluence now. So there's a lot of additional features that are in Quarto on top of being able to very easily work with Python or other languages that you might experience.
And that way you're a little bit more in a non-R centric platform, whereas R Markdown has to run within an R environment. Quarto runs outside of an R environment that can run R within it. So there's a little bit of technicality there, but I think that does open the door for those multilingual teams that we do see.
And to add on that as well, like, you know, in a lot of ways you can think of Quarto as like R Markdown 2.0, but it is our way of bringing R Markdown essentially to anyone. If you're a Python developer, if you're a Julia developer, if you're an observable developer, you can create a Quarto document. And one of my coolest things about Quarto is that the way it's designed, it's actually can support data science languages that may not even exist today. So in 10, 20, 50, a hundred years from now, the landscape of data science could look completely different. There could be new languages that are at that forefront of data science. And we expect Quarto to be around during that time, can easily work with these languages as well.
And to add on that as well, like, you know, in a lot of ways you can think of Quarto as like R Markdown 2.0, but it is our way of bringing R Markdown essentially to anyone. And one of my coolest things about Quarto is that the way it's designed, it's actually can support data science languages that may not even exist today.
Scheduled reports and secure data sources
Another question that came in over on Slido is, can scheduled reports access secured data sources safely? But one of the benefits of using Posit Connect for your job scheduling is that you have very, very tight control over who has access to this content and also know who's getting these email reports as well. And so when this Quarto document is scheduled to run on Posit Connect, there may require access to a secure data set, maybe a username and password, maybe an API key or some type of credentials and Connect makes it very easy to supply those credentials to that piece of content. So it has that privileged access to gather that content. So short answer, yes.
Versioning and previous reports
In the demo, did each day's rerun of the report overwrite the previous day's report? Yeah, great question. So when I clicked on that box, it said publish kind of the output after reruns. Essentially, there's going to be new data when that report reruns. It's going to be a new HTML output and that will basically publish on top of the previous version. But what's really nice about Connect is it actually keeps track of historical versions that you published and you can always revert back to a previous version or download that previous version's bundle so you can reproduce a previous version of that report. So by default, yes, it will kind of build on top every single time you publish a new report.
And in Connect, can you just explain how you access those? Yeah, so as a publisher, as the owner of that content, there'll be an option at the very top, kind of close to those access controls we were talking about before, that allows you to basically access source versions and you can select and see all the various versions of that report that you publish. You can easily click on it and then download it. And so that's probably the easiest way to get access to those previous versions.
Quarto PowerPoint customization
Chuck had a question over on YouTube, was any advancement in the near future for more customization to Quarto PowerPoint renderings beyond the current use of a few master slides? So there's active development on all of the different types of Quarto outputs at the current state. We still, if you're using Microsoft PowerPoint, you would need to create a few master slides. But we are continuing to expand what type of output we do support. So just be on the lookout for Quarto updates in the near future. Yeah, we're putting a ton of development effort into Quarto right now. We're super excited about this tool. So these are all great questions and things that our engineers are currently thinking about.
But I want to say thank you so much for joining us today for the demo and thank you for jumping over here to the Q&A. If you do want to join this demo again, they're every, sorry, almost at every Wednesday, the last Wednesday of every month at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. And you can use this link I just showed here on the screen to add it to your calendar. And it's going to point you to the playlist of all of the end-to-end data science workflow demos. You can see the past two months there as well.
We'll also have a blog post coming out today which will walk through this specific example that you can use to follow along with the recording as well. I did also just want to say before I say goodbye here, if you would like to join us tomorrow, I host the data science hangout here at Posit, which is an open space for us all to just get to chat about data science and what's going on in the world of data across different industries. Every week we feature a different data science leader from the community. And tomorrow will be our kind of season finale before our July break. And Joe Chang, Posit CTO and first employee, the creator of Shiny, will be joining us as our featured leader.
But thank you all so much, Brian and Dave, anything you'd like to add? No, thanks all for joining us, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, really appreciate the participation here. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you all so much. Again, if you have follow up questions that you didn't get a chance to cover here or something you want to cover in more detail, feel free to use that link to schedule some time to chat with our team as well. We'd love to talk with you. Have a great rest of the day, everybody.
