cli_inform doesn't invoke cli.default_handler

[inferentialist]

Based on https://cli.r-lib.org/articles/semantic-cli.html#cli-messages, I would expect cli_abort, cli_warn, and cli_inform to call the handler specified in cli.default_handler. However, these particular functions wrap their rlang analogues and seemingly wind up on another code path.

Here's a simple reproducible example. The first expect_output behaves as expected; the second, fails.

test_that("cli_inform doesn't call cli.default_handler", {

  test_case <- function(cli_op) {
    withr::with_options(
      list(
        cli.default_handler = function(msg) cat("handled")
      ),
      cli_op("foo")
    )
  }

  expect_output(
    test_case(cli::cli_alert),
    "handled"
  )

  expect_output(
    test_case(cli::cli_inform),
    "handled"
  )
})

Hoping this has an easy workaround; and apologies if I overlooked something in the documentation. Thanks for all your work on the cli project!

[gaborcsardi]

Yes, that's a mistake in the documentation, those functions indeed do not use the regular cli code path.

[inferentialist]

Thanks for the clarification.

Wondering if something like this might be a palatable alternative:

  alt_inform <- function(message, ..., .envir = parent.frame()) {
    outer_cnd <- catch_cnd(
      rlang::inform(cli::format_message(message, .envir = .envir), ...)
    )

    cnd <- catch_cnd(
      cli::cli_verbatim(
        format(outer_cnd)
      )
    )

    handler <- getOption("cli.default_handler", cli:::cli_server_default)
    handler(cnd)

    cnd_signal(outer_cnd)
    invisible(NULL)
  }

[gaborcsardi]

cli_inform() is basically the same as cli_bullets(), so you can probably use that instead.

[inferentialist]

My hope was to use the default handler functionality to intercept cli_* calls and reroute them into a log. In general, I wouldn't have access to the source code that invokes the cli_* calls.

Seems like it wasn't designed for this use case. No worries. Thanks for the comments.

[gaborcsardi]

You can always catch all messages, if that helps with your use case:

❯ msgs <- list(); withCallingHandlers(cli::cli_inform("good to know"), message = function(m) msgs <<- c(msgs, list(m)))
good to know

❯ msgs
[[1]]
<message/rlang_message>
Message:
good to know

[gaborcsardi]

See an example for catching all (formatted) messages (not just from cli) here: #708 (comment)