Building Dashboards with shinydashboard

Before you build a shinydashboard, you will first need to understand what a shinyApp is. In this chapter, you will learn what a shinyApp is, and learn what goes into a shinyApp. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to render your own shinyApp.

In the previous chapter, you learned about shiny apps. In this chapter, you will realize that a shinydashboard is really just another shiny app but with more tweakable features. The same outputs and inputs discussed in the previous chapter can be used in exactly the same manner here. You will then learn to carry out some simple wire-framing for a dashboard, during which you can decide where to position outputs and inputs in the dashboard.

In this chapter, you will learn to further enhance your shinydashboard by inserting interactive elements. These will include graphs, geospatial maps, and tables that dashboard users can interact with in real-time.

Now that you are familiar with shinydashboard, we can now add design elements. We will be able to change background colors, modify box dimensions and so on. We will also discuss some basic principles of good UI/UX. Finally, we will show how statuses and CSS formatting can be utilized.