hot swapping of box imports

[tyner]

Say I have two modules, call them X and Y.

Y provides two functions bar and baz, and X exports a function foo which imports bar from Y and calls it:

foo <- function(...) {
   box::use(Y[bar])

   bar(...)
}

Is it possible (without redefining foo in its source file X.R), to make an on-the-fly adjustment/replacement such that X$foo(...) will make use of an updated Y$bar that is effectively copied from Y$baz; something along the lines of:

box::use(./X)
box::use(./Y)
unlockBinding(as.name("bar"), Y)
Y$bar <- Y$baz
X$foo() # I want this to use the version of Y$bar that was copied from Y$baz

The naive approach above isn't working, I suspect because of the lazy caching mechanism in box?

I realize this kind of "hot swapping" is not a best practice, but I'm curious to learn what would be involved in making it work.

[tyner]

Okay, here is one rough approach:

Y.env <- box::topenv(Y)
unlockBinding(as.name("bar"), Y.env)
Y.env$bar <- Y.env$baz

Note: topenv was newly added in version 1.1.3.

[klmr]

Yup, this is the officially supported way.