polished 0.6.0 is now on CRAN!

The newest release of polished, 0.6.0, is now on CRAN. The biggest user facing enhancement of this release is the new ability to secure R Markdown documents using Polished Auth. The secured R Markdown output can be a static document, or it can use the shiny runtime. We discussed this capability in more detail in a previous post here.

Another welcome addition in this release is the ability to access each polished users' data via the session$user object. By default, polished now passes the signed in user's data to session$user. This won't break any of your existing polished Shiny apps as the signed in user's data will always still be available at session$userData$user() as it has been in all previous polished releases.

Polished has historically stored the user's data at this session$userData$user() location because that is where shiny recommends shiny developers and package authors store arbitrary user data. However, as long as you are not using an RStudio hosting option, session$user is usually unused, and, with polished, you can now use it as an alias to session$userData$user(). If you need access to session$user as set by RStudio Connect (or another RStudio hosting option), set the override_user argument of polished_config() to FALSE.

The largest change in this release was an internal refactor of many of the objects and functions for managing Polished Auth. We switched from using a single large R6 class to a base R environment and regular R functions (rather than R6 methods). This change was inspired by our development efforts on a new package, polishedpayments. polishedpayments makes it easy to add Stripe payments to your polished Shiny app. polishedpayments sits between polished and your custom Shiny app. It needs to intercept the polished user and handle the user based on your selected polished and polishedpayments options before passing the user along to your Shiny app.

In our earlier development of polishedpayments, we were having difficulty integrating polishedpayments with polished. After this refactor, the integration is much more seamless. We plan to continue development on other R packages that similarly provide middleware between the polished users and the your custom polished Shiny app. We will share more details on polishedpayments and how you can write similar packages in upcoming blog posts. In the meantime, the source code for polishedpayments can be found here & the development version of the package can be installed with remotes::install_github("Tychobra/polishedpayments").

There are several other minor updates in this polished release. See the release notes for a full list of updates.

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