Extra Skeleton Elements
In shinydashboardPlus: Add More 'AdminLTE2' Components to 'shinydashboard'

Extra template elements

{shinydashboard} skeleton elements are :

dashboardPage() (page wrapper)
dashboardHeader() (navbar)
dashboardSidebar() (left sidebar)

However, AdminLTE has a footer and a right sidebar, also known as controlbar. The footer is usually a good place to put contact information like mail, authors and copyrights, while the controlbar may contain secondary inputs or extra options that are not necessary to be shown in the app.

Controlbar

Basics

To include the controlbar, use dashboardControlbar() in the dedicated controlbar parameter. It has several options:

id is used to capture the current state of the controlbar (open or closed) and to programmatically toggle it with updateControlbar(). This is useful if the controlbar would have to open as a result of another action, to indicate users they have to play with it
collapsed indicated whether the sidebar is opened or closed at start
overlay controls the collapse behavior, that is whether the controlbar has to push the body content to the left. By default, it will cover the body content. Note that you may also control this behavior via the dashboardPagge() option parameter!
skin is a cosmetic parameter with 2 values: dark or light with a default value to dark. Importantly, the global theme option do not impact the controlbar background

The app below will show an open controlbar at start.

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
library(shinydashboardPlus)
shinyApp(
  ui = dashboardPage(
    header = dashboardHeader(),
    sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
    body = dashboardBody(),
    controlbar = dashboardControlbar(collapsed = FALSE),
    title = "DashboardPage"
  ),
  server = function(input, output) { }
)

Include menus

The dashboardControlbar function also accepts to contain tabs, similarly to the dashboardSidebar() navigation menu. controlbarMenu() is a modified shiny::tabsetPanel() that has an optional id to control the select item on the server side with updateControlbarMenu(). selected indicates which item must be selected by default. Below is a use case of the controlbar menu:

menu <- controlbarMenu(
  id = "controlbarMenu",
  controlbarItem(
    "Tab 1",
    "Welcome to tab 1"
  ),
  controlbarItem(
    "Tab 2",
    numericInput("num", "Observations:", 200, min = 1, max = 1000, step = 100)
  )
)

shinyApp(
  ui = dashboardPage(
    header = dashboardHeader(),
    sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
    body = dashboardBody(),
    controlbar = dashboardControlbar(
      skin = "dark",
      menu
    ),
    title = "Right Sidebar"
  ),
  server = function(input, output) { }
)

It is best practice to limit the number of controlbarItem to 5 since the horizontal space is rather limited.

The controlbar API

As mentioned above, the most powerful feature is the possibility to control elements on the server. In the example below, the main sidebar has 3 items, each item will open a specific menu item in the controlbar.

We first create 3 generic sidebar menu items using lapply. Note that the controlbar menu is defined above in the previous example.

sidebarMenu(
  id = "sidebarMenu",
  lapply(1:3, function(i) {
    menuItem(
      sprintf("Menu %s", i), 
      tabName = sprintf("menu_%s", i), 
      icon = icon("circle")
    )
  })
)

input$sidebarMenu takes values in menu_1, menu_2 and menu_3. On the server side, we only recover the item index by splitting the input value as follows strsplit(input$sidebarMenu, "_")[[1]][2]. Then we may conditionally open the controlbar depending on the index value. The update controlbar menu function will update the controlbar menu item according to the index value, that is updateControlbarMenu("controlbarMenu", selected = idx).

To include even more interactivity, we listen to input$controlbarMenu. When the second item is clicked, we toggle the box sidebar with updateBoxSidebar("boxSidebar").

In conclusion, you may imagine a lot of other situations.

shinyApp(
  ui = dashboardPage(
    header = dashboardHeader(),
    sidebar = dashboardSidebar(
      minified = TRUE, 
      collapsed = TRUE,
      sidebarMenu(
        id = "sidebarMenu",
        lapply(1:3, function(i) {
          menuItem(
            sprintf("Menu %s", i), 
            tabName = sprintf("menu_%s", i), 
            icon = icon("circle")
          )
        })
      )
    ),
    body = dashboardBody(
      tabItems(
        tabItem(tabName = "menu_1", "Content 1"), 
        tabItem(
          tabName = "menu_2",
          box(
            title = "Always the same plot!",
            collapsible = TRUE, 
            plotOutput("distPlot"),
            sidebar = boxSidebar(
              id = "boxSidebar",
              background = "#808080",
              width = "50%",
              sliderInput(
                "obs", 
                "Number of observations:",
                min = 0,
                max = 1000, 
                value = 500
              )
            )
          )
        )
      )
    ),
    controlbar = dashboardControlbar(
      id = "controlbar",
      menu
    ),
    title = "DashboardPage"
  ),
  server = function(input, output, session) {
    output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
      hist(rnorm(input$obs))
    })
    # Switch controlbar menu based on sidebar item value. Moreover
    # if the sidebar menu item is 2, the controlbar opens
    observeEvent(input$sidebarMenu, {
      idx <- strsplit(input$sidebarMenu, "_")[[1]][2]
      if (idx == 2) {
        updateControlbar("controlbar")
      }
      updateControlbarMenu("controlbarMenu", selected = idx)
    })

    # Clicking on the second controlbar item makes the box sidebar open
    observeEvent(input$controlbarMenu, {
      if (input$controlbarMenu == "Tab 2") updateBoxSidebar("boxSidebar")
    })

    observeEvent(input$num, {
      updateSliderInput(session, "obs", value = input$num)
    }, ignoreInit = TRUE)

  }
)

Footer

Not surprisingly dashboardFooter() creates a footer element. It has 2 slots, left and right, respectively.

shinyApp(
   ui = dashboardPage(
     header = dashboardHeader(),
     sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
     body = dashboardBody(),
     footer = dashboardFooter(left = "Left content", right = "Right content"),
     title = "DashboardPage"
   ),
   server = function(input, output) { }
 )