Have MyDocuments and Desktop in getvolumes (with solution)

[zeehio]

Right now to have MyDocuments and Desktop as volumes on Windows machines I am using this.

(Note that this depends on powershell being available)

  myVolumes <- function() {
    if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") {
      extra_volumes <- c(Desktop = system2("powershell", "[Environment]::GetFolderPath('Desktop')", stdout = TRUE),
                         MyDocuments = system2("powershell", "[Environment]::GetFolderPath('MyDocuments')", stdout = TRUE),
                         UserProfile = system2("powershell", 'echo $env:USERPROFILE', stdout = TRUE))
    } else {
      extra_volumes <- c()
    }
    c(extra_volumes, shinyFiles::getVolumes()())
  }

And then

  shinyFileChoose(input, 'whatever', roots = mygetVolumes)

Maybe this would be a nice addition to getVolumes.

Currently getVolumes returns a function that is called very often, to see if there are updates on any volume (new USB attached, etc). This has a strong performance penalty on Windows.

To address the performance penalty it would be useful to have a refresh button next to the volume selection menu so getVolumes is only called every once in a while.

As a workaround, if you don't care about "new attached USB drives" you can use:

  list_of_volumes <- mygetVolumes()
  shinyFileChoose(input, 'whatever', roots = list_of_volumes)

[thomasp85]

These system level niceties would indeed be nice, but I'm not going to put a powershell dependency in for the sake of that.

I was unaware of the penalty hit in Windows. The user/developer is free to set the update frequency so it should be easy to control IMO. Otherwise just use a constant vector as you suggest