Below are some useful links for people getting started with R Shiny.
The R Shiny website contains a lot of useful information:
- Tutorials
- A gallery of example applications using R Shiny
- A reference manual (remember to select the version of R Shiny you are using)
If you plan to display graphs in your dashboard, you will need to use a an additional package to generate them:
- ggplot2 can be used to easily create graphs that display in R Shiny
- plotly is another package that can be used to create more interactive graphs
If you want to be able to modify the R Shiny looks and acts, it can be really useful to learn a little about front end web development. You don't need to know a lot ot start using these tools in your Shiny dashboards! R Shiny allows you to insert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into your application, so these are useful tools for customising your applications:
- HTML is the standard markup language for web pages. R Shiny has a lot of in-built functions that generate HTML code for you, but for some content you might have to write your own HTML snippets.
- CSS is the language used to style your HTML. You can easily use this to change fonts, colours, layouts, etc. R Shiny comes with default styles, but you can override these with your own CSS styles.
- JavaScript is used to programme the events that take place on the web page, at the user end. This codde executes inside the browser. Again, R Shiny has some of its own JavaScript, but you can add your own code. You can also communicate between JavaScript and R Shiny. There is some example code in this repository that uses snippets of JavaScript to create customised R Shiny applications.
- Bootstrap is a widely used front end web development framework, used by R Shiny. Because it's built into R Shiny you can easily use it with your custom HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. If you want to customise how R Shiny objects look you will need to override the relevant Bootstrap classes.