Expand the Update-from-openxlsx vignette to show an example using pipes

[Moohan]

Hopefully it's not just me but I found the example in https://janmarvin.github.io/openxlsx2/articles/Update-from-openxlsx.html very confusing where the functions are chained using $ I'm from a tidyverse background which maybe explains it but I've never seen that kind of code before.

The doc implies that you could write something like

border_color <- wb_color(hex = "FF4F81BD")
wb <- wb_workbook("My name here") |>
  wb_add_worksheet("Expenditure", gridLines = FALSE) |>
  wb_add_data(x = USPersonalExpenditure, rowNames = TRUE) |>
  wb_add_border( # add the outer and inner border
    dims = "A1:F6",
    top_border = "thin", top_color = border_color,
    bottom_border = "thin", bottom_color = border_color,
    inner_hgrid = "thin", inner_hcolor = border_color,
    left_border = "", right_border = ""
  ) |>
  wb_set_col_widths( # set column width
    cols = 1:6,
    widths = c("20", rep("10", 5))
  ) |> # remove the value in A1
  wb_add_data(dims = "A1", x = "")

Which looks much more recognisable to my brain!

Is this the case? If so could the doc be updated to include examples of this style?

[JanMarvin]

Hi @Moohan , appreciate the request. Documentation is not our strong side. Guess we can add a few more examples.

[JanMarvin]

Generally speaking, whenever you see a chained function (they are more common in Python afaik), you can replace wb$function() with wb <- wb |> wb_function(). All (probably most) chained wbWorkbook functions have a matching wrapper function beginning with wb_. Similar most wb_ functions should be chainable, but there are some cases where we are not (yet) there. Notably wb_load() and wb_to_df() are not wbWorkbook functions (there is no wb$load() and no wb$to_df()) and not every wbWorkbook function is chainable. No rule without exceptions.

Since I haven't looked at openxlsx in a while and since we have written or at least re-written major parts of the package, please let us know where documentation is lacking and if you need further help let us know in a discussion topic.

For a start, most of the man pages for non wrapper functions contain only dummy texts, but let's not talk about this 😄