Just like the report family of functions makes it easy
to share project updates in an HTML RMarkdown, these reporters can also
help create and send well-formatted email reminders to colleagues.
Note that this will work with all report functions
except report_taskboard() because most eail
clients do not yet support CSS grid.
Report Overview
The report functions are discussed in more detial in the
“Reporting” vignette. As a brief overview, they generally take the
output of a parse function and rewrite the output with
HTML.
my_repo <- create_repo_ref("emilyriederer", "my_repo") issues_res <- get_issues( my_repo , state = "all" ) issues <- parse_issues(issues_res)
report_progress(issues)
By default, the link_url argument is set to
TRUE, so each item is linked to its corresponding GitHub
issue.
In RMarkdown, the rendered HTML is shown because the
report functions append the class "knit_asis"
to the output, which tells knitr to directly insert the
output into the final document instead of interpreting it as character
output. However, to prove that this function is simply writing HTML, we
can see the underlying HTML in RMarkdown by wiping that class:
html <- report_progress(issues) class(html) <- "character" html #> [1] "<p/> <strong> Data cleaning and validation </strong> <em>( 100 % Complete - 3 / 3 )</em> <ul class = 'report_progress' style = 'list-style: none;'> <li> ☑ <a href = 'https://github.com/emilyriederer/experigit/issues/147'>Resolve data quality issues</a> </li> <li> ☑ <a href = 'https://github.com/emilyriederer/experigit/issues/146'>Assess data quality</a> </li> <li> ☑ <a href = 'https://github.com/emilyriederer/experigit/issues/145'>Define data quality standards</a> </li> </ul> <strong> Exploratory data analysis </strong> <em>( 50 % Complete - 1 / 2 )</em> <ul class = 'report_progress' style = 'list-style: none;'> <li> ☐ <a href = 'https://github.com/emilyriederer/experigit/issues/149'>Visualizations</a> </li> <li> ☑ <a href = 'https://github.com/emilyriederer/experigit/issues/148'>Summary statistics</a> </li> </ul> <p/>"
(Note - this is just for illustration purposes! You do NOT have to change the class in order to send emails.)
Sending Emails
HTML output is convenient since most modern email clients support
HTML-based email. We will show an example with gmailr, but
a similar concept should work with mailR (with the
html = TRUE option) and other email packages.
First, as before, simply assign the results of the
report function to a variable.
html <- report_progress(issues)
Next, we can construct an email message using gmailr,
and pass our html object into the
gmailr::html_body() function.
library(gmailr) html_msg <- mime() %>% to("you@somewhere.com") %>% from("me@somewhere.com") %>% subject("Project status update") %>% html_body( html ) send_message(html_msg)
The resulting email looks like this:
Email sent with gmailr