[ARROW-14338] [Docs] Add version dropdown to the pkgdown (R) docs

• Type: Sub-task
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 7.0.0
• Component/s: Documentation, R
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/29908
• Assignee: Nicola Crane
• Reporter: Nicola Crane
• Created: 15/Oct/21 08:57
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:39
• Resolved: 19/Jan/22 13:15

Description

The Python and C++ documentation have support for serving multiple versions of the docs and switching between them thanks to the newly added version switcher. The same doesn't apply to the R docs as they are not implemented in Sphinx and thus can't benefit from the version switcher implemented for Sphinx.

We should provide an equivalent version switcher for the R docs.

We are already hosting multiple versions of the R docs:

• Stable: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/r/
• Dev: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/dev/r/
• Old releases: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/5.0/r/ etc.

So the need is simply for a UI element to enable users to easily navigate between these.

Relevant pkgdown issue: https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/issues/1373

Possible implementation ideas:

• https://insightsengineering.github.io/r.pkg.template/ does it with a dropdown in the main header, I suppose that's something we could do as well (although that would be some manual work to update it in _pkgdown.yml before each version)
• from Ian Cook: I don’t have an example of extra.js being used specifically for version switching, but we already have an extra.js we’re using for a different purpose: https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/r/pkgdown/extra.js. I believe it would be relatively straightforward to use jQuery to replace the static version <span> which looks like this

  <span class="version label label-default" data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="bottom" title="" data-original-title="Released version">6.0.1</span>

  with a <select> that would allow users to navigate to other versions of the R docs

If it is necessary to hard-code R package versions in a file to achieve this, then we could automate the updating of these hard-coded versions at each release through dev/release/utils-prepare.sh, and add a test confirming the update at dev/release/01-prepare-test.rb.

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: ARROW-15155 [Doc] Add support for serving multiple versions of the R documentation
• relates to: ARROW-15366 [Docs] Automate incrementing of package version for R and non-R version switchers
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #12172