Add "row names" to Data viewer and extend support to other objects such as xts

[abrahammbs93]

It will be a great addition for packages such as zoo and xts that use data.frames/matrix and leverage row names attributes.

Including a filter / sorting / aggregation may also be great in general for rownames.

So far the Data viewer dont allow any filtering at all.

[dfalbel]

We currently look for the row.names attribute when querying info for the data explorer:

https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/75de9287cbfc6fd53e2bf7189cb5f0b7d743fcc3/crates/ark/src/data_explorer/r_data_explorer.rs#L1035-L1052

We could special case it to use index when dealing with xts/zoo objects.

To add support for filtering we'd want to make sure xts/zoo objects are treated as numbers here:

https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/1c8817c664c3fa6f50d8e12b8421509dabe3063b/crates/ark/src/data_explorer/r_data_explorer.rs#L1091-L1102

[abrahammbs93]

I believe that zoo/xta support would be a great enabler for econometric and financial applications.

Thanks for you answer

[juliasilge]

This came up in discussions here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/discussions/4315

[ZhimingYe]

We currently look for the row.names attribute when querying info for the data explorer:

https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/75de9287cbfc6fd53e2bf7189cb5f0b7d743fcc3/crates/ark/src/data_explorer/r_data_explorer.rs#L1035-L1052

We could special case it to use index when dealing with xts/zoo objects.

To add support for filtering we'd want to make sure xts/zoo objects are treated as numbers here:

https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/1c8817c664c3fa6f50d8e12b8421509dabe3063b/crates/ark/src/data_explorer/r_data_explorer.rs#L1091-L1102

I have noticed now Positron can't display rownames of matrix. Could you add support of dimnames attribute in the future? Many old packages still depend this as a variable to perform analysis... If explorer can show this, will be greately helpful. Thanks.

The matrix looks like:

> attributes(m)
$dim
[1] 2 3

$dimnames
$dimnames[[1]]
[1] "Row1" "Row2"

$dimnames[[2]]
[1] "Col1" "Col2" "Col3"

But row names can't display.

[dfalbel]

That sounds reasonable to me! I think adding support for dimnames should be straigthforward by making sure we also check for dimnames in:

https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/334d8c93fe2456749e48e483caa7283123c23d6d/crates/ark/src/data_explorer/r_data_explorer.rs#L1006

[dfalbel]

@ZhimingYe I opened a new issue https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/6287 to separate from the original XTS support request.