Book Image

Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny

By : Chris Beeley
Book Image

Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny

By: Chris Beeley

Overview of this book

Although vanilla Shiny applications look attractive with some layout flexibility, you may still want to have more control over how the interface is laid out to produce a dashboard. Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny helps you incorporate this in your applications. The book starts by guiding you in producing an application based on the diamonds dataset included in the ggplot2 package. You’ll create a single application, but the interface will be reskinned and rebuilt throughout using different methods to illustrate their uses and functions using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will also learn to develop an application that creates documents and reports using R Markdown. Furthermore, the book demonstrates the use of HTML templates and the Bootstrap framework. Moving along, you will learn how to produce dashboards using the Shiny command and dashboard package. Finally, you will learn how to lay out applications using a wide range of built-in functions. By the end of the book, you will have an understanding of the principles that underpin layout in Shiny applications, including sections of HTML added to a vanilla Shiny application, HTML interfaces written from scratch, dashboards, navigation bars, and interfaces.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)

Producing layout in rows and columns

As we already know, Shiny uses the grid system from Bootstrap to lay out content. There are a couple of ways to carry this out, but built-in Shiny functions are always involved. The differences between the functions are minor and the basic idea of each is the same.

This section will cover the server installation steps of the following functions:

  • fluidPage()
  • bootstrapPage()
  • fixedPage()

fluidPage()

The most standard way of using the grid layout within Shiny is to use the fluidPage() function. The following code snippet illustrates the fluidPage() function:

server = function(input, output){    

# server code
}
ui = fluidPage(

fluidRow(
column(2, wellPanel(p("Column width 2")))...