Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By : Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve
Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By: Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve

Overview of this book

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny helps you become familiar with the complete R Shiny package. The book starts with a quick overview of R and its fundamentals, followed by an exploration of the fundamentals of Shiny and some of the things that it can help you do. You’ll learn about the wide range of widgets and functions within Shiny and how they fit together to make an attractive and easy to use application. Once you have understood the basics, you'll move on to studying more advanced UI features, including how to style apps in detail using the Bootstrap framework or and Shiny's inbuilt layout functions. You'll learn about enhancing Shiny with JavaScript, ranging from adding simple interactivity with JavaScript right through to using JavaScript to enhance the reactivity between your app and the UI. You'll learn more advanced Shiny features of Shiny, such as uploading and downloading data and reports, as well as how to interact with tables and link reactive outputs. Lastly, you'll learn how to deploy Shiny applications over the internet, as well as and how to handle storage and data persistence within Shiny applications, including the use of relational databases. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to create responsive, interactive web applications using the complete R (v 3.4) Shiny (1.1.0) suite.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Mastering Shiny's UI Functions

So far in this book, we've mastered the basics of Shiny by building our own Gapminder data-explorer application, and we've looked at how to style and extend Shiny applications using HTML and CSS. In this chapter, we are going to extend our toolkit by learning about more of Shiny's UI functions. These allow you to take control of the fine details of the way your application looks and behaves.

In order to do this, we're going to change the way the UI works in the Gapminder application to make it more intuitive and well-featured. The finished code and data for this advanced Gapminder application can be found at https://chrisbeeley.net/website/.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using Shiny's many layout functions effectively
  • Learning how to show and hide parts of the interface
  • Changing the interface...