shinyjs - Easily improve the user interaction and user experience in your Shiny apps in seconds

Copyright 2016 Dean Attali

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 commerical use under a different 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
• Colour Picker input & addin
• More resources

• 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.

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

Functions that help you during Shiny app development

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

install.packages("shinyjs")

To install the latest development version from GitHub:

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

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 interactive 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.

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

• 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?

shinyjs has a colourInput() function that lets you add a colour picker widget to Shiny apps. There is also a colour picker RStudio addin (accessed through the Addins menu) and a gadget (accessed with the colourPicker() function) that can be used to easily select colours. The screenshot below is from the colour picker addin. You can also view a short GIF demo of the addin.

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

If you need help, I strongly suggest browsing the shinyjs tag on StackOverflow or asking your own question there. Of course you can also email me directly if you're in desperate need of help, or open an issue for bugs.

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 :)