README.md

In andrewsali/plotlyBars:

plotlyBars

UPDATE: A much more lightweight and general solution to showing loading animations in Shiny is now provided by shinycssloaders.

It is recommended to use that library instead of this one as that doesn't require any changes in the server function and doesn't change the output id's via Shiny module namespacing. Also it is more general in that you can use it for any kind of Shiny output.

A Shiny module to create plotly bars animation. The animation will automatically appear / disappear exactly as the plotly plot does, therefore you don't need to worry about handling anything else additionally.

The animation starts before the plot calculation, so you can use the plot animation to show calculations happening (instead of using for example shiny::withProgress in case you don't have some meaningful progress indication). Also, the plot animation will continue all the way until the plot is rendered, thereby always giving the user an impression that something is happening.

The animation is based on this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36129522/show-loading-graph-message-in-plotly

Installation & example

How to install:

devtools::install_github("andrewsali/plotlyBars")

How to run the example given in app.R

shiny::runGitHub("andrewsali/plotlyBars")

How to adapt your code

There are two ways to wrap your existing code to show the loading bars (in either case make sure to load the plotlyBars library both in the UI and server R-files). The first is somewhat experimental, but requires minimal code-change. The second has less magic, but requires a bit more (albeit still small) changes.

Wrap your code in withBars / withBarsUI

A simple shorthand is created using the functions withBarsUI and withBars. As shown in app.R, simply wrap the UI call within withBarsUI (you cannot use the %>% unfortunately) and the output code within withBars. So for example:

withBarsUI(plotlyOutput("example"))

would be the UI part and

 withBars(
    output$example <- renderPlotly({
      req(input$show_plot)
      input$redraw_plot
      Sys.sleep(10) # just for demo so you can enjoy the animation
      plot_ly(
        x = runif(1e4), y = runif(1e4), type = "scatter", mode = "markers"
      )
    })
  )

would be the corresponding server part.

Calling as a Shiny module

The wrapping is implemented as a Shiny module, therefore compared to the usual plotlyOutput / renderPlotly pair, slight code change is required.

• In your UI function you need to call plotlyBarsUI("my_id") instead of plotlyOutput("my_id").
• In your server function instead of calling renderPlotly, just use callModule and pass it a reactive that returns a plotly object. For example, in the server function one could write:

callModule(plotlyBars,
             "my_id",
             plot_reactive = reactive({
               plot_ly(
                 x = 2, y = 3, type = "scatter", mode = "markers"
               )
             })
  )

This calls the plotlyBars function with id "my_id" and passes in a reactive that returns a plotly object. So whatever you would've put in renderPlotly, you can just wrap it in reactive and pass it as the plot_reactive argument to shiny::callModule.

andrewsali/plotlyBars documentation built on May 5, 2019, 11:08 p.m.