Update 22nd of October, 2018. We have updated shiny.router package and realeased it on R Cran and GitHub. Full post on shiny.router update with plenty of examples.
The time has come to release the first of our internal tools we use on a regular basis when developing Shiny apps for our customers.
In just a few lines of code added to your project, you get a helpful routing mechanism that allows recreating a particular state of your app.
If you’re in a hurry just go directly to the project’s page:
https://appsilon.github.io/shiny.router/
Benefits of routing
Routing has been around in web frameworks for a while. Since this was something we were missing in Shiny so much we developed this package to simplify our development.
Firstly, it’s possible to share a link like http://your-app-url/stats/dashboard and redirect a user to the specific state in-app.
For instance, in our shiny.router demo, you can directly go to another page.
Secondly, it’s easier to write clean code by separating UI into meaningful code blocks.
How do you integrate it?
First, make sure you have shiny.router dependency installed. This package is not yet available on CRAN, so you have to install it with devtools:
Second, you have to define a routing.
This will create 2 reactive links:
- http://your-app-url redirecting to the Root page and
- http://your-app-url/other redirecting to Other pages in your app.
The first passed argument is also a default redirection for all invalid links(“/” in this case). You can also specify it explicitly via the “default” argument.
Next, make sure you bind and run your “router” object properly in your Shiny app source code.
Now it’s time for a live demo. Try clicking “Page” and “Other” menu links:
Here’s the complete code, if you want to try it out by yourself:
Next steps
You might be wondering how we managed to make this nice-looking demo. This is a small preview of our next package using SemanticUI. You can find it on our Github.
Side Note! You will have to install it to run a second repo example.
Please stay tuned for our next blog post.