Interactive documents can also contain reactive expressions (useful when a piece of dynamic data is used in several places). As in Shiny applications, these values respond to changes in their inputs.
```{r, echo = FALSE}
selectInput("dataset", "Choose Dataset:", c("cars", "iris", "mtcars"))
activeDataset <- reactive({
get(input$dataset, pos="package:datasets", inherits=FALSE)
})
renderTable({
head(activeDataset(), 5)
})
renderPlot({
plot(activeDataset())
})
```
Note that reactive expressions can be used anywhere, including in the definition of inline Shiny applications using the shinyApp function. To learn more about reactive expressions, see the Shiny Tutorial.
You can link to other interactive documents by using the markdown link syntax and specifying the relative path to the document, e.g. [Another Shiny Document](another.Rmd).
Currently, only one document can be active at a time, so documents can’t easily share state (although some primitive global sharing is possible via global.R; see the help for rmarkdown::run).
By default it’s only possible to link to R Markdown files in the same directory subtree as the file on which rmarkdown::run was invoked (i.e you can’t link to ../foo.rmd.) You can use the dir argument to rmarkdown::run to indicate the directory to treat as the root.
An interactive document is generally rendered every time it is shown, and is not shown to the user until render is complete. Consequently, a document that is large or contains expensive computations may take some time to load.
If your document contains interactive Shiny components that don’t need to be rendered right away, you can wrap Shiny code in the rmarkdown::render_delayed function. This function saves its argument until the document is done rendering and has been shown to the user, then evaluates it and injects it into the document when the computation is finished.
Here’s an example that demonstrates how render_delayed works—the code enclosed within the render_delayed call will execute only after the document has been loaded and displayed to the user:
```{r, echo = FALSE}
rmarkdown::render_delayed({
numericInput("rows", "How many cars?", 5)
renderTable({
head(cars, input$rows)
})
})
```
The getting started example demonstrated creating a brand new interactive document. However, any R Markdown output format that produces HTML can be converted into an interacitve document. To convert an existing document:
Add runtime: shiny to its YAML front matter.
Render it with rmarkdown::run instead of rmarkdown::render.
For example, here’s the front matter for a Shiny html_document:
---
title: "My Document"
output: html_document
runtime: shiny
---And here’s the front matter for a Shiny ioslides_presentation:
---
title: "My Document"
output: ioslides_presentation
runtime: shiny
---As described above, once you’ve added runtime: shiny to the document you can run it using either the Run Document command in RStudio or using the rmarkdown::run function. By default, documents are re-rendered on save, so once you’ve got a browser open with the document loaded, just save the R Markdown file to see your changes.