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)

Adding icons to your dashboards

In this section, we will add icons to your dashboard, or, in fact, to any Shiny application. We will look at choosing which icon library you want to use, and how to format your icons.

Let's look at an example application. There are three icons in this application. We can see first of all the more standard use of icons here, to select the graph and table:

The graph icon is from the Font Awesome library of icons, and the table icon is from the glyphicon set. We can see also enlarge and spin the next penguin, also from the font or a set. This is to show some of the formatting options that are possible.

There are two icon libraries accessible from within Shiny: Font Awesome and glyphicon. For more details on each, visit the following links:

Using them is very...