Method to display date difference

[elong0527]

The package may need a method to handle difftime.

> x <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-06-11") - as.Date("2021-03-05"))
> reactable(x)
Error: No method asJSON S3 class: difftime

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.1 (2020-06-06)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.9 (Maipo)

Matrix products: default
BLAS/LAPACK: /data/app/Rtoolkit-EIM/1.1.0/lib/libopenblas_nehalemp-r0.2.20.so

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8     LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                  LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C             LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] mk7902p012dmc2_0.0.1 reactable_0.2.3      haven_2.3.1          tidyr_1.1.3          dplyr_1.0.5          testthat_3.0.2      

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] tidyselect_1.1.0  xfun_0.22         remotes_2.2.0     purrr_0.3.4       vctrs_0.3.6       generics_0.1.0    usethis_2.0.1     htmltools_0.5.1.1 yaml_2.2.1        utf8_1.2.1       
[11] rlang_0.4.10      pkgbuild_1.2.0    pillar_1.5.1      glue_1.4.2        withr_2.4.1       reactR_0.4.4      DBI_1.1.1         sessioninfo_1.1.1 lifecycle_1.0.0   devtools_2.3.2   
[21] htmlwidgets_1.5.3 memoise_2.0.0     evaluate_0.14     knitr_1.31        forcats_0.5.1     callr_3.5.1       fastmap_1.1.0     ps_1.6.0          crosstalk_1.1.1   fansi_0.4.2      
[31] Rcpp_1.0.6        readr_1.4.0       cachem_1.0.4      desc_1.3.0        pkgload_1.2.0     debugme_1.1.0     jsonlite_1.7.2    fs_1.5.0          hms_1.0.0         digest_0.6.27    
[41] processx_3.4.5    rprojroot_2.0.2   cli_2.3.1         tools_4.0.1       magrittr_2.0.1    tibble_3.1.0      crayon_1.4.1      pkgconfig_2.0.3   ellipsis_0.3.1    prettyunits_1.1.1
[51] assertthat_0.2.1  rmarkdown_2.7     rstudioapi_0.13   R6_2.5.0          compiler_4.0.1   

[glin]

Thanks for the report. This is now fixed in the development version on GitHub (ef76018):

• reactable() now works for data frames with difftime objects and objects with custom classes (#164).

The error comes from the jsonlite package not supporting the conversion of difftime objects to JSON, so the fix was to force serialization of these unsupported objects using jsonlite::toJSON(x, force = TRUE). It's not perfect because the difftime objects are just treated as raw numbers, but I think it's the best we can do in reactable. The better solution would be to add difftime support to jsonlite.

Without this fix, you can work around this issue by manually converting the difftime column to numeric values, then adding the units to the formatting:

library(reactable)

x <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-06-11") - as.Date("2021-03-05"))

x$date <- as.numeric(x$date)

reactable(x, columns = list(
  date = colDef(format = colFormat(suffix = " days"))
))