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 Google Charts to your dashboard

In this section, we will look at the different Google Charts that are available, and talk about why you might want to use them. We will see how to add them to a Shiny application. We will also see how to reskin your dashboard to a different color.

Google Charts is a free resource with which you can draw statistical graphics on any web page. They need an internet connection to work, but other than that limitation they're extremely easy to use, perhaps even easier in Shiny using the googleVis package. You will need to install this package with install.packages("googleVis"). There's a gallery of the different graphics available at https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery. For our dashboard, we selected the gauge control, which is an attractive addition to the dashboard, and not possible with besar or ggplot...