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)

Custom interfaces from GET strings

In this example, we're going to produce URLs that allow Shiny to configure itself when the user lands on the page to save them from having to set up their preferences each time. We will make use of two variables: one specifies that a user is only interested in data from the NHS network domain and the other specifies that the user wants a smoothing line present on their trend graph. Users who request a smoothing line will also be taken straight to the trendline tab.

As well as the work with the GET query, the only extra bit we will need here is a function to change the selected panel from tabsetPanel(). This is done, unsurprisingly, using updateTabsetPanel().

Catering to these different needs is very easily done by creating URLs that encode the preferences and giving them to the different users. To simplify the code, we will pretend that...