Add support for R in data viewer

Currently when I run the Jupyter extension linked to the R kernel (IRkernel) in VS Code Insiders, I get the following error:

View(mtcars)
ERROR: Error in View(mtcars): 'View()' not yet supported in the Jupyter R kernel

Adding data viewer support for the R kernel would allow the REditorSupport developers to adapt the Jupyter data viewer for use with the VS Code R extension and debugger. Hopefully the implementation would be similar to what has been done in the Python extension.

Related discussions:

1. In vscode-jupyter: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/issues/1536
2. In vscode-R: https://github.com/Ikuyadeu/vscode-R/issues/506
3. In VSCode-R-Debugger: https://github.com/ManuelHentschel/VSCode-R-Debugger/issues/123

[IanMatthewHuff]

Yeah, we are very much looking at the aspects of our tool that currently only work with python (debugging, variable view, data viewer) and looking at how to expand those out to the entire ecosystem of languages.

This probably isn’t exactly what you need. But we do actually have an extensibility point for another VSCode extension to utilize our data viewer UI. You’d have to do most of the work yourself for providing the data but you could get the look and feel of our data viewer UI with this.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/blob/b368ea9326c13d6497e0f070d89d810d4ff86416/src/client/api.ts#L45 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/blob/b368ea9326c13d6497e0f070d89d810d4ff86416/src/client/datascience/data-viewing/types.ts#L59

We just did this to support a sister team, so we don’t guarantee support for this, but might be helpful if you or anyone from the R world is looking to implement a stopgap solution until our full support comes online.

[IanMatthewHuff]

@danielbasso Yeah, just recreating should be fine.