The goal of dockViewR is to provide a layout manager for Shiny apps and interactive R documents. It builds on top of dockview.

Installation

The latest version of the dockViewR package can be obtained from CRAN:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("dockViewR")

Or, you can install the development version of dockViewR like so:

pak::pak("cynkra/dockViewR")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how spin up a simple dockview app:

library(shiny)
library(bslib)
library(visNetwork)
library(dockViewR)
nodes <- data.frame(id = 1:3)
edges <- data.frame(from = c(1, 2), to = c(1, 3))
ui <- page_fillable(
  dockViewOutput("dock")
)
server <- function(input, output, session) {
  exportTestValues(
    panel_ids = get_panels_ids("dock"),
    active_group = get_active_group("dock"),
    grid = get_grid("dock")
  )
  output$dock <- renderDockView({
    dock_view(
      panels = list(
        panel(
          id = "1",
          title = "Panel 1",
          content = tagList(
            sliderInput(
              "obs",
              "Number of observations:",
              min = 0,
              max = 1000,
              value = 500
            ),
            plotOutput("distPlot")
          )
        ),
        panel(
          id = "2",
          title = "Panel 2",
          content = tagList(
            visNetworkOutput("network")
          ),
          position = list(
            referencePanel = "1",
            direction = "right"
          ),
          minimumWidth = 500
        ),
        panel(
          id = "3",
          title = "Panel 3",
          content = tagList(
            selectInput(
              "variable",
              "Variable:",
              c("Cylinders" = "cyl", "Transmission" = "am", "Gears" = "gear")
            ),
            tableOutput("data")
          ),
          position = list(
            referencePanel = "2",
            direction = "below"
          )
        )
      ),
      theme = "replit"
    )
  })
  output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
    req(input$obs)
    hist(rnorm(input$obs))
  })
  output$network <- renderVisNetwork({
    visNetwork(nodes, edges, width = "100%")
  })
  output$data <- renderTable(
    {
      mtcars[, c("mpg", input$variable), drop = FALSE]
    },
    rownames = TRUE
  )
}
shinyApp(ui, server)

Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you’d like to help improve {dockViewR}, feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests.

Knowledge pre-requisites

{dockViewR} is an htmlwidget, an interactive widget for R, powered by a JS library. To get a minimum starting kit:

JavaScript for R devs: https://book.javascript-for-r.com/.
About htmlwidgets: https://www.htmlwidgets.org/develop_intro.html.

Software pre-requisite

To contribute to this project, you’ll need npm, node, and the R package {packer} to compile the JavaScript code. Please follow guide here. When you are in the project, do the following:

pak::pak("packer")
# Restore JavaScript dependencies in package-lock.json (a bit like the renv.lock)
packer::npm_install()

The JS code uses ES6 modules, meaning that you can define a module in a srcjs/component.js script as follows:

export const blabla = () => {
  console.log("Blabla");
}

and use it in another script, let’s say ./otherscript.js like so:

// ./otherscript.js
import { blabla } from './components.js'

Whenever you are done with changing the JS script, you have to rebuild it:

# Change the code and then rebundle
packer::bundle("development") # For developement mode
packer::bundle() # For production. Defaut!

You may as well bundle for dev using packer::bundle_dev() when in developer mode and when ready for production use packer::bundle_prod(). You may also consider watch() which watches for changes in the srcjs and rebuilds if necessary, equivalent to ⁠npm run watch⁠.

Debugging steps

Whenever you run an app using {dockViewR}, like in inst/examples/demo, open the viewer on a web browser window (preferably Chrome as it is used to illustrate the action in this step, as other browser devtools differ in term of layout).
Right-click on the widget and navigate to the inspect option on the drop-down menu.
At the top, where the tabs are displayed, navigate to the Sources tab. Open from the sidepanel dockviewer/srcjs/widgets/dockview.js script . Once the dockview.js script is opened on the main panel. You can set a breakpoint on any line number of the script and reload the page.

Acknowledgments

This package is built on top of the amazing dockview JavaScript library.