Extra template elements
shinydashboard skeleton elements are :
-
dashboardPage()(page wrapper) -
dashboardHeader()(navbar) -
dashboardSidebar()(left sidebar)
However, AdminLTE has a footer and a right sidebar, also known as controlbar. The footer is usually a good place to put contact information like mail, authors and copyrights, while the controlbar may contain secondary inputs or extra options that are not necessary to be shown in the app.
Controlbar
Basics
To include the controlbar, use dashboardControlbar() in
the dedicated controlbar parameter. It has several options:
- id is used to capture the current state of the controlbar (open or
closed) and to programmatically toggle it with
updateControlbar(). This is useful if the controlbar would have to open as a result of another action, to indicate users they have to play with it - collapsed indicated whether the sidebar is opened or closed at start
- overlay controls the collapse behavior, that is whether the
controlbar has to push the body content to the left. By default, it will
cover the body content. Note that you may also control this behavior via
the
dashboardPagge()option parameter! - skin is a cosmetic parameter with 2 values: dark or light with a default value to dark. Importantly, the global theme option do not impact the controlbar background
The app below will show an open controlbar at start.
library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
library(shinydashboardPlus)
shinyApp(
ui = dashboardPage(
header = dashboardHeader(),
sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
body = dashboardBody(),
controlbar = dashboardControlbar(collapsed = FALSE),
title = "DashboardPage"
),
server = function(input, output) { }
)Include menus
The dashboardControlbar function also accepts to contain
tabs, similarly to the dashboardSidebar() navigation menu.
controlbarMenu() is a modified
shiny::tabsetPanel() that has an optional id to
control the select item on the server side with
updateControlbarMenu(). selected indicates which
item must be selected by default. Below is a use case of the controlbar
menu:
menu <- controlbarMenu(
id = "controlbarMenu",
controlbarItem(
"Tab 1",
"Welcome to tab 1"
),
controlbarItem(
"Tab 2",
numericInput("num", "Observations:", 200, min = 1, max = 1000, step = 100)
)
)
shinyApp(
ui = dashboardPage(
header = dashboardHeader(),
sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
body = dashboardBody(),
controlbar = dashboardControlbar(
skin = "dark",
menu
),
title = "Right Sidebar"
),
server = function(input, output) { }
)It is best practice to limit the number of
controlbarItem to 5 since the horizontal space is rather
limited.
The controlbar API
As mentioned above, the most powerful feature is the possibility to control elements on the server. In the example below, the main sidebar has 3 items, each item will open a specific menu item in the controlbar.
We first create 3 generic sidebar menu items using
lapply. Note that the controlbar menu is defined above in
the previous example.
sidebarMenu(
id = "sidebarMenu",
lapply(1:3, function(i) {
menuItem(
sprintf("Menu %s", i),
tabName = sprintf("menu_%s", i),
icon = icon("circle")
)
})
)input$sidebarMenu takes values in menu_1,
menu_2 and menu_3. On the server side, we only
recover the item index by splitting the input value as follows
strsplit(input$sidebarMenu, "_")[[1]][2]. Then we may
conditionally open the controlbar depending on the index value. The
update controlbar menu function will update the controlbar menu item
according to the index value, that is
updateControlbarMenu("controlbarMenu", selected = idx).
To include even more interactivity, we listen to
input$controlbarMenu. When the second item is clicked, we
toggle the box sidebar with
updateBoxSidebar("boxSidebar").
In conclusion, you may imagine a lot of other situations.
shinyApp(
ui = dashboardPage(
header = dashboardHeader(),
sidebar = dashboardSidebar(
minified = TRUE,
collapsed = TRUE,
sidebarMenu(
id = "sidebarMenu",
lapply(1:3, function(i) {
menuItem(
sprintf("Menu %s", i),
tabName = sprintf("menu_%s", i),
icon = icon("circle")
)
})
)
),
body = dashboardBody(
tabItems(
tabItem(tabName = "menu_1", "Content 1"),
tabItem(
tabName = "menu_2",
box(
title = "Always the same plot!",
collapsible = TRUE,
plotOutput("distPlot"),
sidebar = boxSidebar(
id = "boxSidebar",
background = "#808080",
width = "50%",
sliderInput(
"obs",
"Number of observations:",
min = 0,
max = 1000,
value = 500
)
)
)
)
)
),
controlbar = dashboardControlbar(
id = "controlbar",
menu
),
title = "DashboardPage"
),
server = function(input, output, session) {
output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
hist(rnorm(input$obs))
})
# Switch controlbar menu based on sidebar item value. Moreover
# if the sidebar menu item is 2, the controlbar opens
observeEvent(input$sidebarMenu, {
idx <- strsplit(input$sidebarMenu, "_")[[1]][2]
if (idx == 2) {
updateControlbar("controlbar")
}
updateControlbarMenu("controlbarMenu", selected = idx)
})
# Clicking on the second controlbar item makes the box sidebar open
observeEvent(input$controlbarMenu, {
if (input$controlbarMenu == "Tab 2") updateBoxSidebar("boxSidebar")
})
observeEvent(input$num, {
updateSliderInput(session, "obs", value = input$num)
}, ignoreInit = TRUE)
}
)Footer
Not surprisingly dashboardFooter() creates a footer
element. It has 2 slots, left and right, respectively.
shinyApp(
ui = dashboardPage(
header = dashboardHeader(),
sidebar = dashboardSidebar(),
body = dashboardBody(),
footer = dashboardFooter(left = "Left content", right = "Right content"),
title = "DashboardPage"
),
server = function(input, output) { }
)