Interactive Dashboards
Chien-Lan Hsueh 2022-08-01
UI Programming in Interactive Dashboards
I don’t have many opportunities to build an interactive dashboard. Most of time, I work on developing new algorithms and building helper functions and libraries so that I can help standardize data workflow, analysis and documentation.
Moduled Design
This is something I would like to explore to see if it’s possible to
break down the whole Shiny addp into different modules for easier
development and maintenance. This can increase the reusabilities of the
codes too. Unfortunately, I did a quite terrible job on this project.
Using one single app.R is not a smart start. Comparing to the
experience with using ui.R and server.R in the previous homework,
putting everything in one single script file makes coding experience
bad. At the end of the project, I often found myself scrolling up and
down to sync the codes for the ui and server parts. Therefore, using a
two-file approach is better.
However, it would be nice if we can future break down each ui.R and
server.R into different parts (modules). For example, each page or tab
can be coded in one script file and then be called (or included) for
assembly. I am nor sure if this is feasible but it is worth to spend
some time and efforts to find out.
Dynamic Components
I really like the idea of dynamic UI so I use more and more while I
coded this project. Among the three major ways to make dynamic UI, I
like uiOutpout() and renderUI() the most especially when they are
called with validate() and need().
So the next thing comes to my mind is if it’s possible to create
changing number of these UI components on the fly. That is using
renderUI() to create an array of UI output object in server.R and
render them in ur.R To make this work, I will need to understand how
output object works and see if there is a way to have something like
output["ui_array"][index] to render the UI components.