Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny: A practical guide to building effective web applications and dashboards

Progressively explore UI development with Shiny via practical examples

Key Features

• Write a Shiny interface in pure HTML
• Explore powerful layout functions to make attractive dashboards and other intuitive interfaces
• Get to grips with Bootstrap and leverage it in your Shiny applications

Book Description

Although vanilla Shiny applications look attractive with some layout flexibility, you may still want to have more control over how the interface is laid out to produce a dashboard. Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny helps you incorporate this in your applications.

The book starts by guiding you in producing an application based on the diamonds dataset included in the ggplot2 package. You'll create a single application, but the interface will be reskinned and rebuilt throughout using different methods to illustrate their uses and functions using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will also learn to develop an application that creates documents and reports using R Markdown. Furthermore, the book demonstrates the use of HTML templates and the Bootstrap framework.

Moving along, you will learn how to produce dashboards using the Shiny command and dashboard package. Finally, you will learn how to lay out applications using a wide range of built-in functions.

By the end of the book, you will have an understanding of the principles that underpin layout in Shiny applications, including sections of HTML added to a vanilla Shiny application, HTML interfaces written from scratch, dashboards, navigation bars, and interfaces.

What you will learn

• Add HTML to a Shiny application and write its interfaces from scratch in HTML
• Use built-in Shiny functions to produce attractive and flexible layouts
• Produce dashboards, adding icons and notifications
• Explore Bootstrap themes to lay out your applications
• Get insights into UI development with hands-on examples
• Use R Markdown to create and download reports

Who this book is for

If you have some experience writing Shiny applications and want to use HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to make custom interfaces, then this book is for you.

Table of Contents

1. HTML and markdown
2. Shiny layout functions
3. Dashboards