r - dplyr . and _no visible binding for global variable '.'_ Note in package check

Question

In dplyr one can write code like e.g. using the '.' to refer to the data in the pipe

x <- data.frame(x = 2:4)
y <- data.frame(y = 1:3)

y %>% dplyr::bind_cols(x,.)

but when using it in a function and running the package check it produces the

no visible binding for global variable '.'.

What is the best practice to handle the NOTE?

Answer 1

It seems that best practice is to use .data instead of . and then use import .data from the rlang package. From the programming with dplyr vignette:

If this function is in a package, using .data also prevents R CMD check from giving a NOTE about undefined global variables (provided that you’ve also imported rlang::.data with @importFrom rlang .data).

Unfortunately that doesn't work for the original question with dplyr::bind_cols, but it works for example in dplyr::mutate and dplyr::do.