range_write: Allow modifying a single cell by providing an atomic value or a row/column with a vector instead of only accepting dataframes?

[daattali]

When I want to modify a single cell in a google sheet to the digit 5, I have to use range_write(data = data.frame(meaninglessname = 5), col_names = FALSE) and provide a data.frame with one value in it.

It would be useful if I could provide data = 5 to modify a single cell, or data = 1:5 to modify 5 cells in a row/column.

I generally understand the beauty of keeping arguments consistent in type and not trying to be clever, but since the ss and range arguments already allow variation and are trying to be as useful as possible to the user, this seems like another useful feature.

[sanjmeh]

+1.
It is especially helpful when we have a large googlesheet that needs to be incrementally updated periodically and we do not want to reload the entire table while others may be updating some other parts of the sheet.

In a more general scenario we need the range also to be a vector of the same length as the data, so that we can update non continuous cells in one API call.

e.g.
range_write(data = c("OPEN", "ASSIGNED", "ROLLEDBACK" ), range = c("F7", "F13", "F32"))

This will be super efficient.
Can this be achieved through a data.frame? Am not sure.

[jennybc]

Yes the general request for being able to provide data in some non-data frame format will presumably happen. I just started with data frame as the most important case.

It is especially helpful when we have a large googlesheet that needs to be incrementally updated periodically

The most common sort of incremental update can be handled with googlesheets4::sheet_append(). In general, I would always choose something where Google determines the target cell range, based on the existing shape of the data, instead of me having to determine and specify them. It's less work and less error prone. As you say, what if someone else is editing the same sheet and its dimensions change in between your calls to learn dimension (and therefore determine a target cell range) and add new data?
@sanjmeh I don't think it's likely that googlesheets4 will write to disjoint cells any time soon. You'll either need to make repeated calls to existing functions or look at the innards of our exported cell-writing functions and use the same lower-level tools (request build, make, process) to write a custom function.