ShinyBones

shinybones is an R package that provides a highly opinionated way to organize large, multi-page shiny dashboards. It allows users to focus on building independent modules for each page following a minimal set of conventions, and relegating all the boilerplate code involding in laying them out in the dashboard to a simple YAML configuration file.

Installation

You can install shinybones from github:

remotes::install_github('ramnathv/shinybones')

shinybones ships with two useful snippets stpage and stcomponent that lets you create page and component modules that follow the conventions. You can install it by running st_add_snippets. Note that you will need to restart RStudio for the snippets to be usable.

shinybones::sb_add_snippets()

Usage

You can easily scaffold a shinydashboard app using shinybones by clicking on the New Project menu in RStudio

Conventions

1. A module referred to as foo needs to specify the following functions:

   • ui: foo_ui
   • server: foo
   • sidebar: foo_ui_sidebar (optional)

2. The layout for the dashboard is specified in YAML.

   • Each menu item becomes a menu item in the sidebar.
   • If a menu item has more than 1 child, the children become subitems.
   • If the child of a menu item has a tabs item, they are rendered as a tabSetPanel
   • Each item (page) is connected to a module by its name.

name: Main Dashboard
sidebar:
  - text: Finance
    icon: briefcase
    menu:
      - text: Registrations
        module: registrations
      - text: Subscriptions
        tabs:
          - text: Individual
            module: subscribers_individual
          - text: Group
            module: subscribers_group

  - text: People
    icon: user
    menu:
      - text: People
        tabs:
          - text: Team Size
            module: team_size
          - text: Organogram
            module: organogram

Development Process

1. Each page is independently developed as a standalone module.
2. Use the function preview_module to preview the module.
3. Add it to the dashboard by editing _site.yml.

ToDos

• Hook up passing of data to each module
• Wrap all utilities into a package
• Automatically check if tabnames are unique
• Allow factory modules that can accept static parameters
• Fix bugs where when menu item has only one child, tabNames have to be same.
• Allow deep linking at the tab level (by default)

Acknowledgements

This package was initially named satin, but had to be renamed since it was already in use by a now-archived package on CRAN. Thanks to @dgrtwo for suggesting the name shinybones, which is very appropriate since this package allows you to create a skeleton of a dashboard app!