We have already seen how to use icons earlier in the chapter, but Shiny dashboard makes a nice feature of it by expanding and coloring them to draw attention to key pieces of information. An info box can be drawn statically as follows:

infoBox(width = 3, "Shiny version", "0.12",
  icon = icon("desktop"))

As you can see, the width can be set (using the 12 span rule from the standard bootstrap functions we saw earlier in the chapter) with title (Shiny version) and value (0.12, although you may often wish to pass a number). This function is placed within dashboardBody() in the ui.R file.

Although you may sometimes wish to hard-code info boxes in this way (to show version numbers of an application, as in this case), in the majority of cases, you are going to produce this content dynamically. In this case, you will as always need to do some preparation on server.R first. Here is the code for the first info box:

output$days <- renderInfoBox({
  infoBox(
    "Days", input$dateRange[2...