How would dynamic pages work

[eliocamp]

Documentation can have code that is run dynamically either at install, build or render time:

https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Dynamic-pages

[aitap]

By the time rhelpi18n:::.getHelpFile runs, the \Sexpr[stage=build] and \Sexpr[stage=install] macros have already been evaluated, but \Sexpr[stage=render] have not and will be evaluated by Rd2whatever calling tools:::prepareRd(stage = 'render').

This has consequences for the translation strings. If any translatable strings are produced by Rd macros, they won't be seen by i18n_translation_template without additional work. For an installed package, tools::Rd_db returns all pre-parsed Rd files with \Sexprs processed the same way as .getHelpFile will see them. For a source package, it's probably easier to install the package in a temporary library in order to process everything as expected by code inside the dynamic macros. If you try to run tools:::prepareRd manually, the code may get confused by not running with the same version of the package is has been written for.

Edit: the opposite problem happens for platform-specific chunks wrapped in #ifdef...#endif. They are processed after the build stage but before the install stage. Extracting strings from the value returned by .getHelpFile will miss the documentation for the other platform.