AzureR update: new in May/June (Revolutions)

by Hong Ooi

This is a summary of the updates to AzureR family of packages in May and June 2021.

AzureAuth

Change the default caching behaviour to disable the cache if running inside Shiny.
Update Shiny vignette to clean up redirect page after authenticating (thanks to Tyler Littlefield).
Add a create_AzureR_dir function to create the caching directory manually. This can be useful not just for non-interactive sessions, but also Jupyter and R notebooks, which are not technically interactive in the sense that they cannot read user input from a console prompt.

Add enhanced support for the paging API. Many Graph calls that return lists of objects do so in pages: the first response contains a subset of the full list, along with a link to the next subset. AzureGraph now features a new ms_graph_pager R6 class, which is an iterator for the pages in the result. All list_* R6 methods have been rewritten to use this class, and have filter and n arguments to filter the result set and cap the number of results.
Also add support for the batch request feature: you can pass multiple calls to the API with the graph_request R6 class and call_batch_endpoint function, and get the results back in a single response.
See the Batching and paging vignette for more information on these APIs.
Add list_users(), list_groups(), list_apps() and list_service_principals() methods to the main ms_graph client class.
There is also a new Authentication vignette to guide users through the various ways to authenticate to Microsoft Graph.

Similar to AzureGraph, AzureRMR has a new Authentication vignette that details how to authenticate to Resource Manager. This replaces the old “Service principal” vignette.
Update Resource Manager API version to “2021-04-01”; also update az_subscription$list_locations to handle the new response format in this API version.

Add support for generating a service SAS. There is a new S3 generic get_service_sas with methods for az_storage and storage_endpoint objects, and a similar R6 method for az_storage objects. See ?sas for more information.
Fix storage_save_rds and storage_load_rds to handle compression correctly. In particular, storage_load_rds should now correctly load files saved with saveRDS (#83).
Fix a bug that caused list_blobs to fail when leases were present.
Use a raw connection instead of a raw vector when calling readr::read_delim and read_csv2. This works around an issue introduced in readr 1.4.0 (#85, #86).
Update client API version to “2020-04-08”. In particular, this allows specifying resource_type="d" when creating a service or user delegation SAS for blob storage.
Add an optional service argument to storage_endpoint, to specify the service in question: blob, file, ADLS2, queue or table. This allows use of the generic endpoint function with URLs that don’t fit the usual pattern where the service is part of the hostname, eg custom domain names, IP addresses, etc.
- For the same reason, remove the warning about an unrecognised endpoint URL from blob_endpoint, file_endpoint and adls_endpoint.

Microsoft365R has some significant new features in the latest version:

Add a list_shared_items() method for the ms_drive class to access files and folders shared with you (#45).
Allow getting drives for groups, sites and teams by name. The first argument to the get_drive() method for these classes is now drive_name; to get a drive by ID, specify the argument name explicitly: get_drive(drive_id=*)
Add a by_item argument to the delete_item() method for drives and the delete() method for drive items (#21). This is to allow deletion of non-empty folders on SharePoint sites with data protection policies in place. Use with caution.

Add a search argument to the ms_outlook_folder$list_emails() method. The default is to search in the from, subject and body of the emails.

All list_* class methods now have filter and n arguments to filter the result set and cap the number of results, following the pattern in AzureGraph. The default values are filter=NULL and n=Inf. If n=NULL, an ms_graph_pager iterator object is returned instead to allow manual iteration over the results. Note that support for filtering in the underlying Graph API is somewhat uneven at the moment.
Experimental read-only support for plans, contributed by Roman Zenka.
- Add get_plan() and list_plans() methods to the az_group class. Note that only Microsoft 365 groups can have plans, not any other type of group.
- To get the plan(s) for a site or team, call its get_group() method to retrieve the associated group, and then get the plan from the group.
- A plan has methods to retrieve tasks and buckets, as well as plan details.