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)

Shinyjs

We've already seen that as long as you know JavaScript, using JavaScript is pretty easy in Shiny. The shinyjs package, available on CRAN, actually makes it easy to use extra bits of JavaScript in your application by writing pure R code. Install it with install.packages("shinyjs") and let's take a look.

Shinyjs gives you access to quite a few nice little JavaScript tricks, so see the documentation for more, but we're going to have a look at a few with the help of the Gapminder application. The first is the ability to disable and enable controls. This can be useful to help your users understand how an application works. For example, in the gapminder application, the year control does not do anything when the map tab is selected, since the data used is always the most recent data anyway. We can hide the control, as we saw in the previous chapter,...