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 notifications, messages, and tasks

In this section, we will talk about adding notifications, messages, and tasks, and then how to make the content of them dynamic.

Let's look at the example application. As you can see in the following screenshot, this is a dashboard where we've added icons to the header to allow us access to some menus, tasks, notifications, and messages:

Let's look at the code. In the case where the messages within the menu are static, the code is very simple. The dropdownMenu function is used, to which is added the type, that is, notification message or task, and optionally the status, which affects the color of the little number next to each icon, which gives the number of entries within it. The statuses are the same as the Bootstrap statuses we came across earlier in this chapter. A list is available by typing ?validstatuses in the...