Reading an R plotly object saved as RDS across different systems

[ndrubins]

I'm generating plotly figures in R on my institution's computing cluster and I'd like to be able to view them on my personal mac (e.g., saving a PDF or SVG static image doesn't work well on the cluster - too many installations involved to get plotly::orca to work).

I thought that saving the plotly object to an RDS format file, e.g.:

library(plotly)
p <- plot_ly(data = iris, x = ~Sepal.Length, y = ~Petal.Length,
        marker = list(size = 10,
                       color = 'rgba(255, 182, 193, .9)',
                       line = list(color = 'rgba(152, 0, 0, .8)',
                                   width = 2))) %>%
  layout(title = 'Styled Scatter',
         yaxis = list(zeroline = FALSE),
         xaxis = list(zeroline = FALSE))
saveRDS(r,"p.RDS")

And then reading it in RStudio on my mac shouldn't be a problem. However, when trying to run:

readRDS("p.RDS")

on my mac's RStudio, I get this error:

Error in dirname(to) : a character vector argument expected

Reading it into a variable:
p <- readRDS("p.RDS")
does not cause an error so the object is read in successfully but cannot be displayed.

I see that p$dependencies shows the path to where plotly/htmlwidgets/lib/typedarray is installed on the cluster. Could that be the issue? If so is there anyway to avoid that or change it?

Alternatively, is it possible to simply recreate a plotly figure from p$x?

[cpsievert]

I see that p$dependencies shows the path to where plotly/htmlwidgets/lib/typedarray is installed on the cluster. Could that be the issue? If so is there anyway to avoid that or change it?

Yes, assuming you need to save the R object, there isn't a great workaround other than to manually override the local file path attached to each dependency. If you can get away with just saving the HTML/JS/CSS result, use htmlwidgets::saveWidget() or htmltools::save_html().

[cpsievert]

Actually, reopening since I think it might be possible to use relative versus absolute paths

[ndrubins]

Hi,

Sorry to be a nudge on this.

I installed the latest plotly from github (plotly_4.8.0.9000) and tried the example above again.

I don't get the Error in dirname(to) : a character vector argument expected now, but the plot is not loading on the viewer pane.

Although the first p$dependencies list element now shows a relative path:
..$ file: chr "htmlwidgets/lib/typedarray"
The second and third p$dependencies list elements still show the absolute paths of R/crosstalk/lib/jquery and R/crosstalk/www, respectively, to my R installation on the cluster.

Is this the reason why I'm still not able to load the figure on my Mac?
And if so, can this be fixed?

Thanks a lot

[cpsievert]

You'll also need the development version of crosstalk: devtools::install_github("rstudio/crosstalk")

[ndrubins]

Thanks a lot