2020 Oct: Flexdashboard debugging with shinyobjects

flexdashboard and reactivity

flexdashboard leverages Rmarkdown and shiny to build a dashboard or shiny application. Instead of splitting ui and server functions, flexdashboard takes the advantage of interpretability from Rmarkdown and makes shiny code cleaner and easier to read.

Like shiny, flexdashboard used the reactive programming model which involves user inputs and dynamic data/plots/titles. It can get really complicated when you have a cascade of reactive variables. It also increases the difficulty at the debugging step.

shinyobjects workflow

To troubleshoot reactive data, Jake developed shinyobjects. This R package can access reactive objects in your local environment and allow debugging R code without actually running the app. It will save you time and allow you to iterate more quickly.

Do you also hate having to run the entire shiny code to see what one tiny change will look like? There's a tool you can use to debug specific sections! Check out shinyobjects by @yake_84! #RStats pic.twitter.com/XNs1fi3BGr

— R-Ladies Philly (@RLadiesPhilly) October 21, 2020

The package includes 4 components at the workflow

• view_ui() to see what UI components look like without running the app
• load_reactive_objects() to convert reactive objects to static functions
• create a dummy input list object for users to prepopulate
• convert_selection() to convert code highlighted in source pane

To learn more, please read the detailed vignette and tips and tricks.s

Check it Out

• The slides and code from Jake’s workshop are available on his github!

• The workshop recording is available at our Youtube channel

• Q&A session

Thank you

Thank you to all our attendees, our sponsors (R-ladies Global), and especially our great presenter Jake Riley!!

This post was authored by Chun Su. For more information contact philly@rladies.org