shinyFiles (version 0.3.2)

shinyFilesButton: Create a button to summon the file system navigator

Description

This function adds the required html markup for the client to access the file system. The end result will be the appearance of a button on the webpage that summons the file system navigator dialog box. The last position in the file system is automatically remembered between instances, but not shared between several shinyFiles buttons. After adding a shinyFiles button the selected file(s) will be available in input$inputId (providing input is the name of the input object in the shinyServer() call). The file names should be parsed with parseFilePaths before usage though, to make them compliant with the fileInput function.

Usage

shinyFilesButton(inputId, label, title, multiple)

Arguments

inputId

Input variable to assign the control's value to

label

The text that should appear on the button

title

The heading of the dialog box that appears when the button is pressed

multiple

A logical indicating whether or not it should be possible to select multiple files

Details

When a user selects one or several files the corresponding input variable is set to a list containing a character vector for each file. The character vectors gives the traversal route from the root to the selected file(s). The reason it does not give a path as a string is that the client has no knowledge of the file system on the server and can therefore not ensure proper formatting. As described above the input variable should be wrapped in a call to parseFilePaths for a more beautiful output.

For users wanting to design their html markup manually it is very easy to add a shinyFiles button. The only markup required is:

label

where the id tag matches the inputId parameter, the data-title tag matches the title parameter, the data-selecttype is either "single" or "multiple" ( the non-logical form of the multiple parameter) and the internal textnode mathces the label parameter.

Apart from this the html document should link to a script with the following path 'sF/shinyFiles.js' and a stylesheet with the following path 'sF/styles.css'.

The markup is bootstrap compliant so if the bootstrap css is used in the page the look will fit right in. There is nothing that hinders the developer from ignoring bootstrap altogether and designing the visuals themselves. The only caveat being that the glyphs used in the menu buttons are bundled with bootstrap. Use the css ::after pseudoclasses to add alternative content to these buttons. Additional filetype specific icons can be added with css using the following style:

.sF-file .sF-file-icon .yourFileExtension{ content: url(path/to/16x16/pixel/png); } .sF-fileList.sF-icons .sF-file .sF-file-icon .yourFileExtension{ content: url(path/to/32x32/pixel/png); }

If no large version is specified the small version gets upscaled.

References

The file icons used in the file system navigator is taken from FatCows Farm-Fresh Web Icons (http://www.fatcow.com/free-icons)

See Also

Other shinyFiles: parseFilePaths; shinyFileChoose; shinyFilesExample