Improve documentation on creating custom teal module

[donyunardi]

Summary

We currently have an article on how to create custom teal module here. However, I’m still receiving feedback from internal users about the difficulty in understanding the content of this vignette.

While we provide a full code example on how to write a teal module, there isn’t much context explaining what the code does, leaving users to figure it out themselves. Another common issue I’ve heard is related to troubleshooting custom teal modules. While it’s easy to do this with browser(), explicitly mentioning it in the documentation would be helpful.

Let’s improve this documentation by providing a detailed step-by-step guide on building a teal module. We’ll focus on adding explanations alongside the code and include guidance on troubleshooting teal modules.

Personally, I really like the flow of explanation this topic in our youtube video. It would be great if we follow the same explanation style.

[donyunardi]

@kumamiao
Can I please hear your thought on this?

[kumamiao]

Just spoke with Vincent on this yesterday as well, I agree that adding more explicit documentation on creating customized modules will be helpful for our users. I agree with adding explanations along side the code to make the code examples less intimidating and include guidance on troubleshooting, and like the idea of utilizing the previous video.

Besides mentioned above, a specific flow based on a pretty common use case would be easy-to-follow for app developers: I have a ggplot function that generates a static plot with certain features, how do I convert it into a teal module and what are the steps to follow? We could have an example plot function and then elaborate on how to convert this function to a module step by step:

1. how to convert it to a teal module function, i.e., adding the ui and server components
2. how to add the interactive component
3. how to add show R code
4. how to add it to reporter, etc.

[donyunardi]

Another topic that we have to include in the docs: functional subset for delayed data
insightsengineering/teal.goshawk#301 (comment)