Reading a gpx file into Shiny from a dropbox account - r

Question

I have a Shiny app that accesses data from a dropbox account. I used the instructions at https://github.com/karthik/rdrop2/blob/master/README.md to be been able to read in csv data with no problem, i.e. using the drop_read_csv command from the rdrop2 package after doing the authentication step.
e.g.
my_data<-drop_read_csv("ProjectFolder/DataSI.csv")
My next problem however is that there are going to be a lot of gpx track files uploaded to the dropbox that I want the app to be able to read in. I have tried using:
gpx.files<-drop_search('gpx', path="ProjectFolder/gpx_files")
trk.tmp<-vector("list",dim(gpx.files)[1])
for(i in 1: dim(gpx.files)[1]){
trk.tmp[[i]]<-readOGR(gpx.files$path[i], layer="tracks")
}
But no luck. At the readOGR step, I get:
Error in ogrInfo(dsn = dsn, layer = layer, encoding = encoding, use_iconv = use_iconv, :
Cannot open data source
Hopefully someone can help.

Answer 1

My problem was I hadn't specified the dropbox path properly. I have used the drop_read_csv code and made a drop_readOGR version:
drop_readOGR<-function(my.file, dest=tempdir()){
localfile = paste0(dest, "/", basename(my.file))
drop_get(my.file, local_file = localfile, overwrite = TRUE)
readOGR(localfile, layer="tracks")
}
So now I can just use what I was doing before except I have changed the line in the loop to call the new function.
gpx.files<-drop_search('gpx', path="ProjectFolder/gpx_files")
trk.tmp<-vector("list",dim(gpx.files)[1])
for(i in 1: dim(gpx.files)[1]){
trk.tmp[[i]]<-drop_readOGR(gpx.files$path[i])
}