Is there any use in writing a file locally first before calling write_civis_file?

[crich011]

I have a utility function which takes an object as an argument and outputs a file ID on S3, much like write_civis_file (which it calls under the hood after first writing the given file locally). Is there any utility to this? I feel like the reason I did it this way is just that someone's code who I inherited did it that way for powerpoint documents, rather than there being a particularly good reason.

The resolution to this issue might just be an answer of "no, it is not useful".

[patr1ckm]

If I understand correctly, write_civis_file(obj) already does this. It serializes the file, and returns the file id on S3 after uploading. I don't think a wrapper is needed.

One thing I can imagine is that it can be slightly annoying to save and cleanup objects in temporary files. We have a utility with_tempfile for doing so. Maybe exporting would be helpful?

For example:

with_tempfile(function(fn, obj) { 
  saveRDS(fn)
  write_civis_file(fn)
})

[crich011]

Makes sense! Maybe surfacing that tempfile utility would be useful? But I defer to you on that; happy to close this issue if you're not especially keen on surfacing with_tempfile.

[patr1ckm]

Since this is already a function in http://withr.r-lib.org/reference/with_tempfile.html, I doubt exporting will gain very much.