identify widget type from name

Does anyone have a way to determine the type of widget from its name/ID? For example if "my_text" is a textInput widget, then I would like to be able to call:

is.textInput("my_text")

and be returned TRUE. Or to call

widget.type("my_list")

and be returned "textInput". But neither of these functions exist.

I have looked through all the functions in the shiny and shinyWidgets packages and don't see anything to this extent. There are some back-end functions like session$sendInputMessage() that are not intended for users but might assist.

My naive solution is to try something like the following (sorry if my tryCatch() syntax is not quite right, I don't use it very often):

is.textInput <- function(widget_id){
    out <- tryCatch(
        {
        # attempt to treat it as a textInput, change it and change it back
        tmp <- input[[widget_id]]
        updateTextInput(session, widget_id, value = character(0))
        updateTextInput(session, widget_id, value = tmp)
        },
        error=function(cond) { return("NO") },
        warning=function(cond) { return("NO") },
        finally={}
    )
    # if error message happens then not textInput
    if(out == "NO")
        return("FALSE")
    # if no error message then is textInput
    return("TRUE")
}

But I would rather not be creating deliberate errors/exceptions. And I do not want a logical check to be making changes to the state of the app.

Other suggests for how I might accomplish this?

from identify widget type from name