Rendering Graphics with R using RConnect

[mhpcto]

I have been using R from APL quite a bit but have rarely done any graphics via R.

The example graphics output in the R Interface Guide works fine.

I had a need to display a US map and chose the "usmap" and "ggplot2" packages. From R, both commandline and RStudio, these packages work fine and open graphics windows but I can't make it work via RConnect.

The simplest test is (in R):

> library(usmap); library(ggplot2); plot_usmap()

This will open a graphics window and show a US map.

If I execute the same via r.x from APL I get ... nothing.

⎕←r.x 'library(usmap); library(ggplot2);plot_usmap()'
gtools ggplot2 usmap stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods
base

What am I missing?

[Vince|Dyalog]

Hi mhpcto,

1) I have searched the internet, and found a suggestion about using the print method.

      r.x'library(usmap)'
      r.x'library(ggplot2)'
      r.x 'print(plot_usmap())'

2) Our rscproxy does not seem to work with the latest R 4.2. For the future, we now recommend an interface to R called rsconnect that a customer Kimmo Linna wrote. You can get it on github. https://github.com/kimmolinna/rsconnect

I have put it in D:\git\rsconnect\ on my computer.

      ]load D:\git\rsconnect\rserve.dyalog
RS.start
 r←⎕NEW #.RS.Rserve
r.eval 'library(usmap)'
      r.eval 'library(ggplot2)'
      r.eval 'print(plot_usmap())'
      r.eval 'print(plot_usmap())'

I did find that I needed to make the call twice to get the display to update, and I will log that as an issue.

Regards,

Vince

[mhpcto]

Thanx for the input. Based on your response I did dive a little deeper into R plotting and how to render and save plots.

While plotting and viewing is kinda 1980's primitive (I have not found a way to pop up a graphics window that has controls for resizing, scaling, saving, etc. the way the RStudio graph window does) it seems to work with R 4.2 and rconnect. I will give the alternative a try.

Displaying graphs is working ok, but graph saving is a mess even in R native. I found that I can actually save a graph being displayed with 'dev.copy(svg, "myfile.svg") (many supported formats) but the file gets written only after I call 'dev.off()'!?!