How to make a custom panel responsive to selection

[RiboRings]

Problem

Recently I was trying to make the panels of iSEEtree reactive to selections transmitted by other panels, like the RowDataTable. I was struggling because even after adding a .multiSelectionResponsive and .multiSelectionRestricted methods to the custom panel, they would not change upon selecting rows in RowDataTable. An example of this was reported in this iSEEtree issue.

Solution

After a while, I discovered that it would worked if I added the following selection to the .generateOutput method (taken from here):

  all_cmds[["select"]] <- .processMultiSelections(x, all_memory, all_contents, panel_env)

  if (is.null(panel_env[["row_selected"]])){
    panel_env[["se"]] <- se
  } else {
    panel_env[["se"]] <- se[unlist(panel_env[["row_selected"]]), ]
  }

Also, I wanted this specific panel (RowTreePlot) to be reactive only to row selection (and not column selection), so I added the following methods:

setMethod(".multiSelectionRestricted", "RowTreePlot", function(x) {
  slot(x, "RowSelectionRestrict")
})

setMethod(".multiSelectionResponsive", "RowTreePlot", function(x, dims = character(0)) {
  if ("row" %in% dims) {
    return(TRUE)
  }
  return(FALSE)
})

and hid the column-specific observers:

#' @importFrom methods callNextMethod
setMethod(".hideInterface", "RowTreePlot", function(x, field) {
  if (field %in% c("SelectionHistory", "ColumnSelectionRestrict",
                   "ColumnSelectionDynamicSource", "ColumnSelectionSource")) {
    TRUE
  } else {
    callNextMethod()
  }
})

The fixing commit is available here.

[kevinrue]

Regarding your first code block

  if (is.null(panel_env[["row_selected"]])){
    panel_env[["se"]] <- se
  } else {
    panel_env[["se"]] <- se[unlist(panel_env[["row_selected"]]), ]
  }

Any particular reason for the syntax is.null(panel_env[["row_selected"]]) ?

I couldn't recognise the coding pattern, so I went to check in iSEE/iSEE and found this:
https://github.com/iSEE/iSEE/blob/51cd280a4486e7a6173e0856bc8833e9c75f7a98/R/family_RowDotPlot.R#L450

        if (exists("row_selected", envir=envir, inherits=FALSE)) {
            target <- "row_selected"
        } else {
            target <- "list()"
        }

Is your row_selected expected to be NULL or can you simply check for its existence?

[RiboRings]

Thank you! I wasn't aware of this cleaner solution. It will be added to the next version.