README.md

In smbache/zeroclipr: Simple Shiny/R Wrapper for ZeroClipboard

zeroclipr: Simple Clipboard for R/Shiny Apps

Introduction

ZeroClipboard provides an easy way to copy text to the clipboard using an invisible Adobe Flash movie and a JavaScript interface, and is used e.g. by GitHub. The zeroclipr R package is a very simple package providing a way of creating reactive copy-to-clipboard action buttons for Shiny R applications. The package has a single UI component, the zeroclipButton, but is also meant for easy implementations of more generalized usage of ZeroClipboard.

Requirements and installation

The two necessary files ZeroClipboard.js and ZeroClipboard.swf are bundled with the package, and the current included version is v2.3.0-beta.1. The package is not on CRAN, but can be installed from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("smbache/zeroclipr")

Example Usage

So far, there is only one UI component, zeroclipButton. This can be used either directly in the UI for a static copy-text, or with renderUI for a reactive copy-text.

This example shows how to setup a button for copying data as csv to clipboard:

library(zeroclipr)
library(shiny)

runApp(list(

  # The UI
  ui = bootstrapPage(

    # Control the styling of the button. This is not necessary but will make the
    # button feel more natural, with the flash object on top:
    singleton(tags$head(tags$style(
      '
      .zeroclipboard-is-hover { background-color: steelblue; }
      .zeroclipboard-is-active { background-color: firebrick; }
      '
    ))),

    # A select input for selecting subset
    selectInput("species", "Select Species: ", 
                choices = c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica")),

    # The UI placeholder for the copy button
    uiOutput("clip"),

    # A text input for testing the lipboard content.
    textInput("paste", "Paste here:")
  ),

  # The server
  server = function(input, output) {

    # A reactive data source, based on the input$species
    species_data <- reactive({
      subset(iris, Species == input$species)
    })

    # Create the text representation of the subset for the clipboard and
    # setup the copy button.
    output$clip <- renderUI({
      str <- textConnection("irisdata", open = "w")
      write.csv(species_data(), str, row.names = FALSE)
      close(str)
      zeroclipButton("clipbtn", "Copy", paste(irisdata, collapse= "\n"), icon("clipboard"))
    })
  }
))

Creating Other Clipboard UI components

The package, by design, does not ship with many different components, nor does it try to interface all the available functionality of ZeroClipboard.js. It merely exposes the required js and swf components, and makes it easy to create whatever kind of component you need. Inspecting the included zeroclipButton you'll see that you can easily tailor other components:

zeroclipButton <- function(inputId, label, clipText, icon = NULL, width = NULL)
{
  tagList(
    zeroclipboard_setup(),
    actionButton(inputId = inputId, label = label, icon = icon, 
                 width = NULL, `data-clipboard-text` = clipText),
    tags$script(sprintf('var client_%s = new ZeroClipboard( $("#%1$s") );', inputId))
  )
}

You just need zeroclipr to be loaded, and to include the zeroclipboard_setup() in your component.

smbache/zeroclipr documentation built on May 30, 2019, 5:02 a.m.