manipulateWidget-package: Add even more interactivity to interactive charts

In manipulateWidget: Add Even More Interactivity to Interactive Charts

Description

This package is largely inspired by the manipulate package from Rstudio. It can be used to easily create graphical interface that let the user modify the data or the parameters of an interactive chart. It also provides the combineWidgets function to easily combine multiple interactive charts in a single view.

Details

manipulateWidget is the main function of the package. It accepts an expression that generates an interactive chart (and more precisely an htmlwidget object. See http://www.htmlwidgets.org/ if you have never heard about it) and a set of controls created with functions mwSlider, mwCheckbox... which are used to dynamically change values within the expression. Each time the user modifies the value of a control, the expression is evaluated again and the chart is updated. Consider the following code:

manipulateWidget(myPlotFun(country), country = mwSelect(c("BE", "DE", "ES", "FR")))

It will generate a graphical interface with a select input on its left with options "BE", "DE", "ES", "FR". By default, at the beginning the value of the variable country will be equal to the first choice of the corresponding input. So the function will first execute myPlotFun("BE") and the result will be displayed in the main panel of the interface. If the user changes the value to "FR", then the expression myPlotFun("FR") is evaluated and the new result is displayed.

The interface also contains a button "Done". When the user clicks on it, the last chart is returned. It can be stored in a variable, be modified by the user, saved as a html file with saveWidget from package htmlwidgets or converted to a static image file with package webshot.

Finally one can easily create complex layouts thanks to function combineWidgets. For instance, assume we want to see a map that displays values of some variable for a given year, but on its right side we also want to see the distributions of three variables. Then we could write:

myPlotFun <- function(year, variable) {
  combineWidgets(
    ncol = 2, colSize = c(3, 1),
    myMap(year, variable),
    combineWidgets(
      ncol = 1,
      myHist(year, "V1"),
      myHist(year, "V2"),
      myHist(year, "V3"),
    )
  )
}

manipulateWidget(
  myPlotFun(year, variable),
  year = mwSlider(2000, 2016, value = 2000),
  variable = mwSelect(c("V1", "V2", "V3"))
)

Of course, combineWidgets can be used outside of manipulateWidget. For instance, it can be used in an Rmarkdown document to easily put together interactive charts.

For more concrete examples of usage, you should look at the documentation and especially the examples of manipulateWidget and combineWidgets.

See Also

manipulateWidget, combineWidgets

manipulateWidget documentation built on Oct. 5, 2021, 9:10 a.m.