The HTML UI application demonstrates defining a Shiny user interface using a standard HTML page rather than a UI object. To run the example type:
library(shiny)runExample("08_html")
Defining an HTML UI
Many Shiny apps use a UI object file to build their user interfaces. While this is a fast and convenient way to build user interfaces, some applications will inevitably require more flexiblity. For this type of application, you can define your user interface directly in HTML. For such apps, the directory structure looks like this:
|-- app.R
|-- www
|-- index.html
In this example we re-write the front-end of the Tabsets application (runExample("06_tabsets")) using HTML directly. Here is the source code for the new user interface definition:
www/index.html
HTML UI
Distribution type:
Normal
Uniform
Log-normal
Exponential
Number of observations:
Summary of data:
Plot of data:
style="width: 100%; height: 300px">
Head of data:
There are few things to point out regarding how Shiny binds HTML elements back to inputs and outputs:
HTML form elements (in this case a select list and a number input) are bound to input slots using their name attribute.
Output is rendered into HTML elements based on matching their id attribute to an output slot and by specifying the requisite css class for the element (in this case either shiny-text-output, shiny-plot-output, or shiny-html-output).
With this technique you can create highly customized user interfaces using whatever HTML, CSS, and JavaScript you like.
Server function
All of the changes from the original Tabsets application were to the user interface, the server script remains the same:
# Define server logic for random distribution app ----server
Building the Shiny app object
We end the app.R file with a call to the shinyApp function to build the Shiny app object using the UI and server components we defined above.
shinyApp(ui=htmlTemplate("www/index.html"),server)
Learn more
For more on this topic, see the following resources: