bones_skeleton: Make a skeleton placeholder

In bones: Content-Shaped Loading Placeholders for 'shiny' Outputs

Make a skeleton placeholder

Description

Makes the grey placeholder on its own, with no output in it. You do not need this for a Shiny output, because withBones() makes the placeholder for you. Use this function where there is no Shiny output: for example, inside a renderUI() while you get data, or to look at a shape while you design a page.

Usage

bones_skeleton(
  type = "text",
  rows = 6L,
  cols = 4L,
  lines = 3L,
  n = 3L,
  height = NULL
)

Arguments

type	The shape: "text", "table", "plot", "cards", "value", or one of the chart or table shapes above.
rows	The number of body rows, for type = "table" and the table package shapes.
cols	The number of columns, for type = "table" and the table package shapes.
lines	The number of lines, for type = "text".
n	The number of cards or values, for type = "cards" and "value".
height	A CSS height for the placeholder, or a number of pixels. NULL gives a default for the type, the same one that withBones() uses.

Details

The skeleton uses the animation and the colours from bones_defaults().

Value

An htmltools::tag, with the stylesheet attached.

Chart shapes

A chart has a shape for each common kind: "bar", "line", "scatter", "area", "histogram", "pie", "heatmap", "map", "network", "timeline" and "wordcloud". "plot" is the same as "bar". withBones() finds the shape of a map, network, timeline or word cloud widget from its output. plotOutput() cannot say which kind it will hold, because renderPlot() decides that later, on the server. So you name the kind yourself.

Table shapes

A table from a table package has a shape that copies that package: "dt", "reactable", "gt" and "rhandsontable". withBones() finds it from the output by itself.

Examples

bones_skeleton("text", lines = 4)
bones_skeleton("table", rows = 8, cols = 5)
bones_skeleton("plot", height = "300px")
bones_skeleton("scatter", height = "300px")
bones_skeleton("dt", rows = 10, cols = 5)

bones documentation built on Oct. 16, 2026, 5:06 p.m.