Sometimes when using Displayr, you have text in an output, and you want to enter it into a field in the Displayr GUI. This post describes how to do this.

Consider the situation where you want to create a dropdown control showing possible ages, from 0, 1, 2, all the way up to 122 (the current verified record age for a person). Having to type 0; 1; 2; 3; etc. into the Item list field would be pretty painful. Fortunately, there is an easy hack to avoid this pain (and, if you are creating the item list for a control, an even better way is to link the control to the R Output using the Items from R Output field).

  1. Insert > R Output
  2. In the example above, the following code will create the text that I want:
    paste0(0:122, collapse = "; ")
    (if copying this example, replace the prettily-formatted double quotation marks with the normal ones when you type, as otherwise you will get an error)
  3. In the Object Inspector, select Properties > LAYOUT > Wrap text output (this is not strictly necessary, but usually makes step 5 a bit easier)
  4. Press Export > Embed and Snapshot and View (note that this will re-publish whatever document you are working on, so if the document is not ready, you are better off doing this in another document)
  5. Using your mouse pointer, select the text (see below), right-click and select Copy
  6. Press Done
  7. Go to wherever you want to insert the text, right-click, and select Paste

You should now have the desired text pasted into the GUI.

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