Parameterised books

[psychemedia]

rmarkdown provides a straightforward way of generating multiple, parameterised reports from a single, base "master report", configured by passing in parameter values from the rmarkdown:render function (RStudio/RMarkdown Parameterized Reports):

rmarkdown::render("MyDocument.Rmd", params = list(
  region = "west"
))

How can a book be generated as compilation of a set of reports? eg something like:

bookdown::render("ParameterisedDocument.Rmd", params = list(
  list(region = "west", otherparameter=1),
  list(region = "east", otherparameter=2)
))

concatenating separate sections of the report from a ParameterisedDocument.Rmd with parameter values list(region = "west", otherparameter=1), for the first part, list(region = "east", otherparameter=2) for the second etc?

What about if I also wanted to top and tail the book with a openingPart.Rmd and a closingPart.Rmd?

i.e. how would I construct something with the sense of:

rmd_files: ["openingPart.Rmd", list(base ="ParameterisedDocument.Rmd", params = list( list(region = "west", otherparameter=1), list(region = "east", otherparameter=2) ) ), "closingPart.Rmd"]

[yihui]

bookdown::render_book() has a ... argument that is passed to rmarkdown::render(), which means you can certainly pass the params argument there.

For the second question, no, there is not possible (well, it is, but not straightforward).

BTW, I don't know where you got the idea

params = list(
  list(region = "west", otherparameter=1),
  list(region = "east", otherparameter=2)
)

but even with rmarkdown::render(), you cannot pass a list of lists of params. You have to do the explicit loop by youself, and pass one set of params each time.

[psychemedia]

Re: the idea:

params = list(
  list(region = "west", otherparameter=1),
  list(region = "east", otherparameter=2)
)

it was just pseudo-code. My use case is I want a report in book form with an intro, a summary, and then N intermediate chapters which are all generated from the same template but with different parameters.

[quantitative-technologies]

@psychemedia this is exactly what I want to achieve.

It's the obvious way to report on multiple experiments that only differ in parameters.

[zachary-waller]

Not sure if anyone is still playnig around with this, but I've made a repository that does this:
https://github.com/zachary-waller/parameterised_bookdown
It's very bare bones, but basically takes the same approach as what bookdown does. I hope it helps someone out!

[psychemedia]

@zachary-waller This is back in scope for me atm... will check your repo out.

One thing that occurred to me is incrementally adding to a report. Eg you are producing a set of monthly reports as part of an annual report, and want to run the script to add each month to the current report. I guess setting caches up properly may help with that.

[github-actions]

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