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)

Downloading graphics and reports

The option to download graphics and reports can be added easily using downloadHandler(). Essentially, downloadHandler() has two arguments that both contain functions: one to define the path to which the download should go, and one that defines what is to be downloaded.

The first thing we need to do is take any functions that are used either in the download graphic request or the report and make them reactive functions, which can be called from anywhere rather than instructions to draw a graph within a call to renderPlot(). The effect of this, of course, is that we only have one function to write and maintain rather than one inside the download graphic function, one inside the download report function, and so on. This is achieved very simply:

trendGraph <- reactive({  
  ... rest of function that was inside renderPlot  
})  

The graph can now...