README.md
In ramnathv/dashifyr: Modular Dashboards with Shiny

Dashifyr is an experimental dashboarding framework based on Shiny. It provides a highly modular plug-and-play infrastructure for creating high-quality dashboards. It supports multiple widgets (currently justgage, knob and handlebars), and is extensible. Interactive JS charts can be easily integrated into Dashifyr using rCharts

screenshot

Dashifyr requires the latest development versions of httpuv, shiny and shinyGridster. You can install these dependencies along with dashifyr using the following lines

install.packages("httpuv")
require(devtools)
install_github('shiny', 'rstudio')
install_github('shiny-gridster', 'wch')
install_github('dashifyr', 'ramnathv')

Note that you can also install httpuv from source, by following these instructions on the github repo

Dashifyr comes with a demo app, which can be run using the following commands.

require(dashifyr)
demoapp = system.file('demo', package = 'dashifyr')
shiny::runApp(demoapp)

Dashifyr uses a modular design aimed at making it easy to add new dashboard widgets. Let us take the example of the knob widget, which uses jqueryKnob. The inst/widgets/knob library contains the following files:

config.yml      --> configuration file specifying assets
jquery.knob.js  --> the javascript library file
knob.css        --> styles for the knob widget
shinyKnob.js    --> Shiny bindings

Let us take a deeper look into each of these files.

Config.yml

It is a YAML file that contains the relative paths of the css and js assets.

knob:
  jshead: [jquery.knob.js, shinyKnob.js]
  css: [knob.css]

shinyKnob.js

This is a javascript file that provides the bindings necessary to communicate with the data.

// This output binding handles statusOutputBindings
var knobOutputBinding = new Shiny.OutputBinding();
$.extend(knobOutputBinding, {
  find: function(scope) {
    return scope.find('.knob_output');
  },
  renderValue: function(el, data) {
    if (!$(el).val()){
      $(el).knob()
    }
    $(el).val(data.val).trigger('change')
    $(el).trigger('configure', data.config)
  }
});
Shiny.outputBindings.register(knobOutputBinding, 'dashboard.knobOutputBinding');

In addition to these files, a widget should also specify a *Output function. The knobOutput function is shown below.

knobOutput <- function(outputId, value){
 tags$input(id = outputId, class = "knob_output")
}

I would like to thank Winston Chang for providing me with the inspiration for this dashboarding framework. I have borrowed extensively from his shiny dashboard app demo. I have also stolen ideas from the dashing framework, to create a modular plug-and-play widget infrastructure, replacing the batman bindings with shiny bindings.

Dashifyr is released under the MIT License. All R package dependencies and javascript libraries used by Dashifyr are licensed under their own terms. Please check before making use of them commercially.

Other interesting dashboarding libraries based on Shiny in the making are