shinyjs

Easily improve the user experience of your Shiny apps in seconds

Official website · Copyright 2016 Dean Attali

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shinyjs lets you perform common useful JavaScript operations in Shiny apps that will greatly improve your apps without having to know any JavaScript.

Examples include: hiding an element, disabling an input, resetting an input back to its original value, delaying code execution by a few seconds, and many more useful functions for both the end user and the developer. shinyjs can also be used to easily call your own custom JavaScript functions from R.

shinyjs is under the AGPL-3 license. For a commercial license, please contact me. If you find shinyjs useful, please consider supporting its development!

Table of contents

• Demos and tutorials
• Overview of main functions
• Installation
• How to use
• Basic use case - complete working example
• Calling your own JavaScript functions from R
• FAQ and extra tricks
• More resources

Demos and tutorials

• Demo Shiny app that lets you play around with some of the functionality in shinyjs.
• Video of my shinyjs talk (30 min) and the corresponding presentation slides from the 2016 Shiny Developer Conference.
• Video of my shinyjs talk (5 min) and the corresponding presentation slides from the 2016 useR Conference.

Overview of main functions

Note: In order to use any shinyjs function in a Shiny app, you must first call useShinyjs() anywhere in the app's UI.

Function	Description
show/hide/toggle	Display or hide an element (optionally with an animation).
hidden	Initialize a Shiny tag as invisible (can be shown later with a call to show).
enable/disable/toggleState	Enable or disable an input element, such as a button or a text input.
disabled	Initialize a Shiny input as disabled.
reset	Reset a Shiny input widget back to its original value.
delay	Execute R code (including any shinyjs functions) after a specified amount of time.
alert	Show a message to the user.
click	Simulate a click on a button.
html	Change the text/HTML of an element.
onclick	Run R code when a specific element is clicked. Was originally developed with the sole purpose of running a shinyjs function when an element is clicked, though any R code can be used.
onevent	Similar to onclick, but can be used with many other events instead of click (for example, listen for a key press, mouse hover, etc).
addClass/removeClass/toggleClass	add or remove a CSS class from an element.
runjs	Run arbitrary JavaScript code.
extendShinyjs	Allows you to write your own JavaScript functions and use shinyjs to call them as if they were regular R code. More information is available in the section "Calling your own JavaScript functions from R" below.

Functions that help you during Shiny app development

Function	Description
runcodeUI+runcodeServer	Adds a text input to your app that lets you run arbitrary R code live.
showLog	Print any JavaScript console.log() messages in the R console, to make it easier and quicker to debug apps without having to open the JS console.
logjs	Print a message to the JavaScript console (mainly used for debugging purposes).
inlineCSS	Easily add inline CSS to a Shiny app.

Check out the shinyjs demo app to see some of these in action, or install shinyjs and run shinyjs::runExample() to see more demos.

Installation

To install the stable CRAN version:

install.packages("shinyjs")

To install the latest development version from GitHub:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("daattali/shinyjs")

How to use

A typical Shiny app has a UI portion and a server portion. Before using most shinyjs functions, you need to call useShinyjs() in the app's UI. It's best to include it near the top as a convention.

Here is a minimal Shiny app that uses shinyjs:

library(shiny)
library(shinyjs)

ui <- fluidPage(
  useShinyjs(),  # Include shinyjs

  actionButton("button", "Click me"),
  textInput("text", "Text")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  observeEvent(input$button, {
    toggle("text")  # toggle is a shinyjs function
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

This is how most Shiny apps should initialize shinyjs - by calling useShinyjs() near the top of the UI.

However, if you use shinyjs in any of the following cases:

• In Shiny dashboards (built using the shinydashboard package)
• In Shiny apps that use a navbarPage layout
• In Rmd documents
• In Shiny apps that manually build the user interface with an HTML file or template (instead of using Shiny's UI functions)

Then you should see the Including shinyjs in different types of apps document.

If your Shiny app doesn't fall into any of these categories, then the above code sample should be enough to get your started with including shinyjs in your app.

Basic use case - complete working example

See the shinyjs example app walk-through document for a step-by-step guide on how to add a variety of shinyjs features to a simple app in order to make it more user friendly.

Calling your own JavaScript functions from R

You can also use shinyjs to add your own JavaScript functions that can be called from R as if they were regular R functions using extendShinyjs. This is only suitable for advanced users who are familiar with JavaScript and wish to facilitate the communication between R and JavaScript.

To learn about this feature and see how useful it can be, see the extendShinyjs: Calling your own JavaScript functions from R document.

FAQ and extra tricks

There are several questions that pop up very frequently in my email or on StackOverflow about "How do I use shinyjs to do ___?" Here is a list of a few of these common questions with links to a solution that could be useful. Note that all of these require using extendShinyjs().

• How do I show/hide the shinydashboard sidebar programmatically?
• How do I hide/disable a tab?
• How do I refresh the page?
• How do I call a JavaScript function from a different JavaScript library?
• How do I change the values of a sliderInput?
• How do I call JavaScript code and use the return value?

I also keep a long list of various Shiny tips & tricks for solving common Shiny problems, many of which make use of shinyjs.

More resources

This document is meant to serve as a high overview of shinyjs. There are three more documents provided in shinyjs to teach you various aspects of the package:

• Including shinyjs in different types of apps
• shinyjs example app walk-through
• extendShinyjs: Calling your own JavaScript functions from R

If you need help with shinyjs, a good place to start is to try to get help from the community. I suggest browsing the shinyjs tag on StackOverflow or asking your own question there. You can also try getting help on the RStudio Community forums.

If you still can't get an answer to your question, you can contact me. However, because of the high volume of support emails I receive daily, I can only provide support for a fee (as part of my Shiny consulting).

Motivation & alternatives using native Shiny

The initial release of this package was announced on my blog and discusses these topics.

Contributions

If you have any suggestions or feedback, I would love to hear about it. You can either message me directly, open an issue if you want to request a feature/report a bug, or make a pull request if you can contribute.

I'd like to give special thanks to the Shiny developers, especially Joe Cheng for always answering all my Shiny questions.

Lastly, if you find shinyjs useful, please consider supporting me for the countless hours I've spent building, documenting, and supporting this package :)