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)

Info boxes

We have already seen how to use icons earlier in this chapter, but shinydashboard makes a nice feature of it by expanding and coloring icons to draw attention to key pieces of information. An info box can be drawn statically as follows:

infoBox(width = 3, "Shiny version", "1.1.0", 
  icon = icon("desktop")) 

As you can see, the width can be set (using the 12 span rule from the standard Bootstrap functions we saw earlier in this chapter) with a title (Shiny version) and value (1.1.0) (although you may often wish to pass a number). This function is placed within dashboardBody() in the ui.R file. For more information on the arguments of this function, type ?infoBox into the console.

Although you may sometimes wish to hardcode info boxes in this way (to show version numbers of an application, as in this case), in the majority of cases, you...