Shiny Dashboard Demo and Thoughts

Below is a dashboard style shiny project that includes Plotly graphs. This dashboard is hosted on shinyapps.io. In order to create the layout I used the fluidRow and column function in the shiny library. However this didn’t seem to work to well when putting the Plotly graphs side by side, hence their reduced size.

It appears that using Shiny to create Plotly dashboards may be less visually appealing, (at least without some html css touchups that you may have to include yourself) compared to using the Dashboard.ly web API.

However an issue that I found when using this web API in R was the ability to properly format my data into a json string. That had to be done using the json.dump function found in the json library in Python.

Here’s the code used in ui.R:

shinyUI(fluidPage(
		titlePanel(
		  fluidRow(
		  column(5,
		  sliderInput("bins", "Number of bins:", min = 1, max = 50, value = 10))
		  ,
		  column(3,
		  selectInput("colour1", "Choose a colour for the first plot:", 
		              choices = c("blue", "green", "red"))),
		  column(3,
		  selectInput("colour2", "Choose a colour for the first plot:", 
		              choices = c("navy", "orange", "maroon"))
		  ))),
		mainPanel(
		      		fluidRow(
					column(6,graphOutput("trendPlot")),
					column(6, graphOutput("trendPlot2"))
					)
		      
		)
	)
)