Bug fixes

  • In v1.8.1, shiny.js starting throwing an error when input/output bindings have duplicate IDs. This error is now only thrown when shiny::devmode(TRUE) is enabled, so the issue is still made discoverable through the JS error console, but avoids unnecessarily breaking apps that happen to work with duplicate IDs. (#4019)

New features and improvements

  • Added ExtendedTask, a new simple way to launch long-running asynchronous tasks that are truly non-blocking. That is, even within a session, an ExtendedTask won’t block the main thread from flushing the reactive graph (i.e., UI updates won’t be blocked). ExtendedTask pairs nicely with new bslib::input_task_button() and bslib::bind_task_button() functions, which help give user feedback and prevent extra button clicks. (#3958)

  • Added a JavaScript error dialog, reporting errors that previously were only discoverable by opening the browser’s devtools open. Since this dialog is mainly useful for debugging and development, it must be enabled with shiny::devmode(). (#3931)

  • runExamples() now uses the bslib package to generate a better looking result. It also gains a package argument so that other packages can leverage this same function to run Shiny app examples. For more, see ?runExamples. (#3963, #4005)

  • Added onUnhandledError() to register a function that will be called when an unhandled error occurs in a Shiny app. Note that this handler doesn’t stop the error or prevent the session from closing, but it can be used to log the error or to clean up session-specific resources. (thanks @JohnCoene, #3993)

Changes

  • renderDataTable()/dataTableOutput() are officially deprecated in favor of their {DT} equivalents. Migrating to DT, in most cases, just requires changing renderDataTable() to DT::renderDT() and dataTableOutput() to DT::DTOutput(). Also, to promote migration, when a recent version of DT is available, renderDataTable()/dataTableOutput() now automatically use their DT equivalent (and provide a message that they are doing so). If this happens to degrade an existing app, set options(shiny.legacy.datatable = TRUE) to get the old (i.e., non-DT) implementation. (#3998)

  • Both conditionalPanel() and uiOutput() are now styled with display: contents by default in Shiny apps that use Bootstrap 5. This means that the elements they contain are positioned as if they were direct children of the parent container holding the conditionalPanel() or uiOutput(). This is probably what most users intend when they use these functions, but it may break apps that applied styles directly to the container elements created by these two functions. In that case, you may include CSS rules to set display: block for the .shiny-panel-conditional or .shiny-html-output classes. (#3957, #3960)

Bug fixes

  • Notifications are now constrained to the width of the viewport for window widths smaller the default notification panel size. (#3949)

  • Fixed #2392: downloadButton() now visibly returns its HTML tag so that it renders correctly in R Markdown and Quarto output. (Thanks to @fennovj, #2672)

  • Calling updateSelectizeInput() with choices and selected now clears the current selection before updating the choices and selected value. (#3967)

  • Loading a Shiny app in a package-like directory will no longer warn if autoloading is disabled by the presence of an R/_disable_autoload.R file. (Thanks to @krlmlr and @tanho63, #3513)

Breaking changes

  • Closed #3899: The JS function Shiny.bindAll() is now asynchronous. This change is driven by the recent push toward making dynamic UI rendering asynchronous, which is necessary for shinylive (and should’ve happened when it was first introduced in Shiny v1.7.5). The vast majority of existing Shiny.bindAll() uses should continue to work as before, but some cases may break if downstream code relies on it being synchronous (i.e., blocking the main thread). In this case, consider placing any downstream code in a .then() callback (or await the result in a async function). (#3929)
    • Since renderContent() calls bindAll() (after it inserts content), it now returns a Promise<void> instead of void, which can be useful if downstream code needs to wait for the binding to complete.

New features and improvements

Bug fixes

  • fileInput() no longer has unwanted round corners applied to the buttonLabel. (#3879)

  • Fixed #3898: wrapFunctionLabel() no longer throws an error if the name is longer than 10000 bytes. (#3903)

Bug fixes

  • On r-devel (R > 4.3.1), isTruthy(NULL) now returns FALSE (as it does with older versions of R). (#3906)

Possibly breaking changes

  • For reactiveValues() objects, whenever the $names() or $values() methods are called, the keys are now returned in the order that they were inserted. (#3774)

  • The value provided to options(shiny.json.digits) is now interpreted as number of digits after the decimal instead of significant digits. To treat the value as significant digits, wrap it in I() (e.g., options(shiny.json.digits = I(4))). This new default behavior not only helps with reducing digits in testing snapshots, but is also more consistent with jsonlite’s default behavior. (#3819)

New features and improvements

  • Closed #789: Dynamic UI is now rendered asynchronously, thanks in part to the newly exported Shiny.renderDependenciesAsync(), Shiny.renderHtmlAsync(), and Shiny.renderContentAsync(). Importantly, this means <script> tags are now loaded asynchronously (the old way used XMLHttpRequest, which is synchronous). In addition, Shiny now manages a queue of async tasks (exposed via Shiny.shinyapp.taskQueue) so that order of execution is preserved. (#3666)

  • Fixes #3840: updateSliderInput() now warns when attempting to set invalid min, max, or value values. Sending an invalid update message to an input no longer causes other update messages to fail. (#3843)

  • sliderInput() now has a larger target area for clicking or tapping on the slider handle or range. (#3859)

  • Closed #2956: Component authors can now prevent Shiny from creating an input binding on specific elements by adding the data-shiny-no-bind-input attribute to the element. The attribute may have any or no value; its presence will prevent binding. This feature is primarily useful for input component authors who want to use standard HTML input elements without causing Shiny to create an input binding for them. Additionally, Shiny now adds custom classes to its inputs. For example, checkboxInput() now has a shiny-input-checkbox class. These custom classes may be utilized in future updates to Shiny’s input binding logic. (#3861)

  • Map objects are now initialized at load time instead of build time. This avoids potential problems that could arise from storing fastmap objects into the built Shiny package. (#3775)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #3771: Sometimes the error ion.rangeSlider.min.js: i.stopPropagation is not a function would appear in the JavaScript console. (#3772)

  • Fixed #3833: When width is provided to textAreaInput(), we now correctly set the width of the <textarea> element. (#3838)

Full changelog

  • Closed #3849: In R-devel, a warning was raised when Shiny was loaded because as.numeric_version() was called with a number instead of a string. (#3850)

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Closed #3719: Output container sizes, which are available via session$clientData and getCurrentOutputInfo(), no longer round to the nearest pixel (i.e., they are now more exact, possibly fractional values). (#3720)

  • Closed #3704, #3735, and #3740: renderPlot() no longer generates an error (or segfault) when it executes before the output is visible. Instead, it’ll now use the graphics device’s default size for it’s initial size. Relatedly, plotPNG() now ignores NULL values for width/height (and uses the device’s default width/height instead). (#3739)

New features and improvements

Bug fixes

  • Shiny 1.7.0 changed the icon(lib="fontawesome") implementation from a bundled copy of fontawesome, to the {fontawesome} package. This led to issue #3688, where icons that were previously working, were now breaking. That’s because {fontawesome} 0.3.0 and earlier did not have support for icon names used in Font Awesome 5 and earlier, only the newest icon names used in Font Awesome 6. Now, {fontawesome} 0.4.0 has restored support for those older icon names, and Shiny 1.7.2.1 has updated its {fontawesome} requirement to >=0.4.0.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

New features and improvements

  • Closed #1545: insertUI() now executes <script> tags. (#3630)

  • fileInput() can set the capture attribute to facilitates user access to a device’s media capture mechanism, such as a camera, or microphone, from within a file upload control (W3C HTML Media Capture). (Thanks to khaled-alshamaa, #3481)

  • Closed tidyverse/dplyr#5552: Compatibility of dplyr 1.0 (and rlang chained errors in general) with req(), validate(), and friends.

  • Closed tidyverse/dplyr#6154: Values from an actionButton() had S3 classes in the incorrect order.

  • Closed #3346: Default for ref input in runGithub() changed from "master" to "HEAD". (#3564)

  • Closed #3619: In R 4.2, splitLayout() no longer raises warnings about incorrect length in an if statement. (Thanks to @dmenne, #3625)

Bug fixes

  • Closed #3250:rlang/{tidyeval} conditions (i.e., warnings and errors) are no longer filtered from stack traces. (#3602)

  • Closed #3581: Errors in throttled/debounced reactive expressions no longer cause the session to exit. (#3624)

  • Closed #3657: throttle.ts and the Throttler typescript objects it provides now function as intended. (Thanks gto @dvg-p4, #3659)

  • The auto-reload feature (options(shiny.autoreload=TRUE)) was not being activated by devmode(TRUE), despite a console message asserting that it was. (#3620)

  • Closed #2297: If an error occurred in parsing a value in a bookmark query string, an error would be thrown and nothing would be restored. Now a message is displayed and that value is ignored. (Thanks to @daattali, #3385)

  • Restored the previous behavior of automatically guessing the Content-Type header for downloadHandler functions when no explicit contentType argument is supplied. (#3393)

  • Previously, updating an input value without a corresponding Input binding element did not trigger a JavaScript shiny:inputchanged event. Now, if no Input binding element is found, the shiny:inputchanged event is triggered on window.document. (#3584)

  • Closed #2955: Input and output bindings previously attempted to use el['data-input-id'], but that never worked. They now use el.getAttribute('data-input-id') instead. (#3538)

Minor improvements

  • When taking a test snapshot, the sort order of the json keys of the input, output, and export fields is currently sorted using the locale of the machine. This can lead to inconsistent test snapshot results. To opt-in to a consistent ordering of snapshot fields with shinytest, please set the global option options(shiny.snapshotsortc = TRUE). shinytest2 users do not need to set this value. (#3515)

  • Closed rstudio/shinytest2#222: When restoring a context (i.e., bookmarking) from a URL, Shiny now better handles a trailing = after _inputs_ and _values_. (#3648)

  • Shiny’s internal HTML dependencies are now mounted dynamically instead of statically. (#3537)

  • HTML dependencies that are sent to dynamic UI now have better type checking, and no longer require a dep.src.href field. (#3537)

Bug Fixes

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • The format and locale arguments to sliderInput() have been removed. They have been deprecated since 0.10.2.2 (released on 2014-12-08).

  • Closed #3403: insertTab()’s position parameter now defaults to "after" instead of "before". This has the benefit of allowing us to fix a bug in positioning when target = NULL, but has the drawback of changing the default behavior when target is not NULL. (#3404)

New features and improvements

  • Bootstrap 5 support. (#3410 and rstudio/bslib#304)

    • As explained here, to opt-in to Bootstrap 5, provide bslib::bs_theme(version = 5) to a page layout function with a theme argument (e.g., fluidPage(), navbarPage(), etc).
  • Closed #3322, #3313, #1823, #3321, #3320, #1928, and #2310: Various improvements to navbarPage(), tabsetPanel(), tabPanel(), navbarMenu(), etc. Also, these functions are now powered by the bslib package’s new nav() API (consider using bslib’s API to create better looking and more fully featured navs). (#3388)

  • All uses of list(...) have been replaced with rlang::list2(...). This means that you can use trailing , without error and use rlang’s !!! operator to “splice” a list of argument values into .... We think this’ll be particularly useful for passing a list of tabPanel() to their consumers (i.e., tabsetPanel(), navbarPage(), etc). For example, tabs <- list(tabPanel("A", "a"), tabPanel("B", "b")); navbarPage(!!!tabs). (#3315 and #3328)

  • installExprFunction() and exprToFunction() are now able to handle quosures when quoted = TRUE. So render-functions which call these functions (such as with htmlwidgets) can now understand quosures. Users can also use rlang::inject() to unquote a quosure for evaluation. This also means that render function no longer need env and quoted parameters; that information can be embedded into a quosure which is then passed to the render function. Better documentation was added for how to create render functions. (#3472)

  • icon(lib="fontawesome") is now powered by the fontawesome package, which will make it easier to use the latest FA icons in the future (by updating the fontawesome package). (#3302)

  • Closed #3397: renderPlot() new uses ggplot2::get_alt_text() to inform an alt text default (for ggplot2 plots). (#3398)

  • modalDialog() gains support for size = "xl". (#3410)

  • Addressed #2521: Updated the list of TCP ports that will be rejected by default in runapp.R, adding 5060, 5061 and 6566. Added documentation describing the port range (3000:8000) and which ports are rejected. (#3456)

Other improvements

Bug fixes

Library updates

  • Closed #3286: Updated to Font-Awesome 5.15.2. (#3288)

  • Updated to jQuery 3.6.0. (#3311)

This release focuses on improvements in three main areas:

  1. Better theming (and Bootstrap 4) support:
  1. Caching of reactive() and render*() (e.g. renderText(), renderTable(), etc) expressions.
  • Such expressions automatically cache their most recent value, which helps to avoid redundant computation within a single “flush” of reactivity. The new bindCache() function can be used to cache all previous values (as long as they fit in the cache). This cache may be optionally scoped within and/or across user sessions, possibly leading to huge performance gains, especially when deployed at scale across user sessions.
  • For more details, see help(bindCache, package = "shiny")
  1. Various improvements to accessibility for screen-reader and keyboard users.
  • For more details, see the accessibility section below.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Closed #3074: Shiny no longer supports file uploads for Internet Explorer 8 or 9. (#3075)

  • Subtle changes, and some soft-deprecations, have come to freezeReactiveValue and freezeReactiveVal (#3055). These functions have been fragile at best in previous releases (issues #1791, #2463, #2946). In this release, we’ve solved all the problems we know about with freezeReactiveValue(input, "x"), by 1) invalidating input$x and set it to NULL whenever we freeze, and 2) ensuring that, after a freeze, even if the effect of renderUI or updateXXXInput is to set input$x to the same value it already has, this will result in an invalidation (whereas by default, Shiny filters out such spurious assignments).

    Similar problems may exist when using freezeReactiveVal, and when using freezeReactiveValue with non-input reactive values objects. But support for those was added mostly for symmetry with freezeReactiveValue(input), and given the above issues, it’s not clear to us how you could have used these successfully in the past, or why you would even want to. For this release, we’re soft-deprecating both of those uses, but we’re more than willing to un-deprecate if it turns out people are using these; if that includes you, please join the conversation at https://github.com/rstudio/shiny/issues/3063. In the meantime, you can squelch the deprecation messages for these functions specifically, by setting options(shiny.deprecation.messages.freeze = FALSE).

Accessibility

  • Added bootstrap accessibility plugin under the hood to improve accessibility of shiny apps for screen-reader and keyboard users: the enhancements include better navigations for alert, tooltip, popover, modal dialog, dropdown, tab Panel, collapse, and carousel elements. (#2911)

  • Closed #2987: Improved accessibility of “live regions” – namely, *Output() bindings and update*Input(). (#3042)

  • Added appropriate labels to icon() element to provide screen-reader users with alternative descriptions for the fontawesome and glyphicon: aria-label is automatically applied based on the fontawesome name. For example, icon("calendar") will be announced as “calendar icon” to screen readers. “presentation” aria role has also been attached to icon() to remove redundant semantic info for screen readers. (#2917)

  • Closed #2929: Fixed keyboard accessibility for file picker button: keyboard users can now tab to focus on fileInput() widget. (#2937)

  • Fixed #2951: screen readers correctly announce labels and date formats for dateInput() and dateRangeInput() widgets. (#2978)

  • Closed #2847: selectInput() is reasonably accessible for screen readers even when selectize option is set to TRUE. To improve selectize.js accessibility, we have added selectize-plugin-a11y by default. (#2993)

  • Closed #612: Added alt argument to renderPlot() and renderCachedPlot() to specify descriptive texts for plotOutput() objects, which is essential for screen readers. By default, alt text is set to the static text, “Plot object,” but even dynamic text can be made with reactive function. (#3006, thanks @trafficonese and @leonawicz for the original PR and discussion via #2494)

  • Added semantic landmarks for mainPanel() and sidebarPanel() so that assistive technologies can recognize them as “main” and “complementary” region respectively. (#3009)

  • Closed #2844: Added lang argument to ui *Page() functions (e.g., fluidPage, bootstrapPage) that specifies document-level language within the app for the accessibility of screen readers and search-engine parsers. By default, it is set to empty string which is commonly recognized as a browser’s default locale. (#2920)

  • Improved accessibility for radioButtons() and checkboxGroupInput(): All options are now grouped together semantically for assistive technologies. (thanks @jooyoungseo, #3187).

Minor new features and improvements

  • Added support for Shiny Developer Mode. Developer Mode enables a number of options() to make a developer’s life easier, like enabling non-minified JS and printing messages about deprecated functions and options. See ?devmode() for more details. (#3174)

  • New reactiveConsole() makes it easier to interactively experiment with reactivity at the console (#2518).

  • When UI is specified as a function (e.g. ui <- function(req) { ... }), the response can now be an HTTP response as returned from the (newly exported) httpResponse() function. (#2970)

  • selectInput and selectizeInput now warn about performance implications when thousands of choices are used, and recommend server-side selectize be used instead. (#2959)

  • Closed #2980: addResourcePath() now allows paths with a leading . (thanks to @ColinFay). (#2981)

  • Closed #2972: runExample() now supports the shiny.port option (thanks to @ColinFay). (#2982)

  • Closed #2692: downloadButton() icon can now be changed via the icon parameter (thanks to @ColinFay). (#3010)

  • Closed #2984: improved documentation for renderCachedPlot() (thanks to @aalucaci). (#3016)

  • reactiveValuesToList() will save its reactlog label as reactiveValuesToList(<ID>) vs as.list(<ID>) (#3017)

  • Removed unused (and non-exported) cacheContext class.

  • testServer() can accept a single server function as input (#2965).

  • shinyOptions() now has session-level scoping, in addition to global and application-level scoping. (#3080)

  • runApp() now warns when running an application in an R package directory. (#3114)

  • Shiny now uses cache_mem from the cachem package, instead of memoryCache and diskCache. (#3118)

  • Closed #3140: Added support for ... argument in icon(). (#3143)

  • Closed #629: All update* functions now have a default value for session, and issue an informative warning if it is missing. (#3195, #3199)

  • Improved error messages when reading reactive values outside of a reactive domain (e.g., reactiveVal()()). (#3007)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1942: Calling runApp("app.R") no longer ignores options passed into shinyApp(). This makes it possible for Shiny apps to specify what port/host should be used by default. (#2969)

  • Fixed #3033: When a DiskCache was created with both max_n and max_size, too many items could get pruned when prune() was called. (#3034)

  • Fixed #2703: Fixed numerous issues with some combinations of min/value/max causing issues with date[Range]Input() and updateDate[Range]Input(). (#3038, #3201)

  • Fixed #2936: dateYMD was giving a warning when passed a vector of dates from dateInput which was greater than length 1. The length check was removed because it was not needed. (#3061)

  • Fixed #2266, #2688: radioButtons and updateRadioButtons now accept character(0) to indicate that none of the options should be selected (thanks to @ColinFay). (#3043)

  • Fixed a bug that textAreaInput() doesn’t work as expected for relative width (thanks to @shrektan). (#2049)

  • Fixed #2859: renderPlot() wasn’t correctly setting showtext::showtext_opts()’s dpi setting with the correct resolution on high resolution displays; which means, if the font was rendered by showtext, font sizes would look smaller than they should on such displays. (#2941)

  • Closed #2910, #2909, #1552: sliderInput() warns if the value is outside of min and max, and errors if value is NULL or NA. (#3194)

Library updates

  • Removed html5shiv and respond.js, which were used for IE 8 and IE 9 compatibility. (#2973)

  • Removed es5-shim library, which was internally used within selectInput() for ECMAScript 5 compatibility. (#2993)

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Fixed #2869: Until this release, renderImage() had a dangerous default of deleteFile = TRUE. (Sorry!) Going forward, calls to renderImage() will need an explicit deleteFile argument; for now, failing to provide one will result in a warning message, and the file will be deleted if it appears to be within the tempdir(). (#2881)

New features

  • The new shinyAppTemplate() function creates a new template Shiny application, where components are optional, such as helper files in an R/ subdirectory, a module, and various kinds of tests. (#2704)

  • runTests() is a new function that behaves much like R CMD check. runTests() invokes all of the top-level R files in the tests/ directory inside an application, in that application’s environment. (#2585)

  • testServer() is a new function for testing reactive behavior inside server functions and modules. (#2682, #2764, #2807)

  • The new moduleServer function provides a simpler interface for creating and using modules. (#2773)

  • Resolved #2732: markdown() is a new function for writing Markdown with Github extensions directly in Shiny UIs. Markdown rendering is performed by the commonmark package. (#2737)

  • The getCurrentOutputInfo() function can now return the background color (bg), foreground color (fg), accent (i.e., hyperlink) color, and font information of the output’s HTML container. This information is reported by plotOutput(), imageOutput(), and any other output bindings containing a class of .shiny-report-theme. This feature allows developers to style an output’s contents based on the container’s CSS styling. (#2740)

Minor new features and improvements

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #2606: debounce() would not work properly if the code in the reactive expression threw an error on the first run. (#2652)

  • Fixed #2653: The dataTableOutput() could have incorrect output if certain characters were in the column names. (#2658)

Documentation Updates

Library updates

Minor patch release: fixed some timing-dependent tests failed intermittently on CRAN build machines.

Minor patch release to account for changes to the grid package that will be upcoming in the R 4.0 release (#2776).

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Resolved #2554: Upgraded jQuery from v.1.12.4 to v3.4.1 and bootstrap from v3.3.7 to v3.4.1. (#2557). Since the jQuery upgrade may introduce breaking changes to user code, there is an option to switch back to the old version by setting options(shiny.jquery.version = 1). If you’ve hard-coded shared/jquery[.min].js in the HTML of your Shiny app, in order to downgrade, you’ll have to change that filepath to shared/legacy/jquery[.min].js.

Improvements

  • Resolved #1433: plotOutput()’s coordmap info now includes discrete axis limits for ggplot2 plots. As a result, any shinytest tests that contain ggplot2 plots with discrete axes (that were recorded before this change) will now report differences that can safely be updated. This new coordmap info was added to correctly infer what data points are within an input brush and/or near input click/hover in scenarios where a non-trivial discrete axis scale is involved (e.g., whenever scale_[x/y]_discrete(limits = ...) and/or free scales across multiple discrete axes are used). (#2410)

  • Resolved #2402: An informative warning is now thrown for mis-specified (date) strings in dateInput(), updateDateInput(), dateRangeInput(), and updateDateRangeInput(). (#2403)

  • If the shiny.autoload.r option is set to TRUE, all files ending in .r or .R contained in a directory named R/ adjacent to your application are sourced when your app is started. This will become the default Shiny behavior in a future release (#2547)

  • Resolved #2442: The shiny:inputchanged JavaScript event now triggers on the related input element instead of document. Existing event listeners bound to document will still detect the event due to event bubbling. (#2446)

  • Fixed #1393, #2223: For plots with any interactions enabled, the image is no longer draggable. (#2460)

  • Resolved #2469: renderText now takes a sep argument that is passed to cat. (#2497)

  • Added resourcePaths() and removeResourcePaths() functions. (#2459)

  • Resolved #2433: An informative warning is now thrown if subdirectories of the app’s www/ directory are masked by other resource prefixes and/or the same resource prefix is mapped to different local file paths. (#2434)

  • Resolved #2478: cmd + shift + f3 and ctrl + shift + f3 can now be used to add a reactlog mark. If reactlog keybindings are used and the reactlog is not enabled, an error page is displayed showing how to enable reactlog recordings. (#2560)

Bug fixes

  • Partially resolved #2423: Reactivity in Shiny leaked some memory, because R can leak memory whenever a new symbols is interned, which happens whenever a new name/key is used in an environment. R now uses the fastmap package, which avoids this problem. (#2429)

  • Fixed #2267: Fixed a memory leak with invalidateLater. (#2555)

  • Fixed #1548: The reactivePoll function leaked an observer; that is the observer would continue to exist even if the reactivePoll object was no longer accessible. #2522

  • Fixed #2116: Fixed an issue where dynamic tabs could not be added when on a hosted platform. (#2545)

  • Resolved #2515: selectInput() and selectizeInput() now deal appropriately with named factors. Note that updateSelectInput() and updateSelectizeInput() do not yet handle factors; their behavior is unchanged. (#2524, #2540, #2625)

  • Resolved #2471: Large file uploads to a Windows computer were slow. (#2579)

  • Fixed #2387: Updating a sliderInput()’s type from numeric to date no longer changes the rate policy from debounced to immediate. More generally, updating an input binding with a new type should (no longer) incorrectly alter the input rate policy. (#2404)

  • Fixed #868: If an input is initialized with a NULL label, it can now be updated with a string. Moreover, if an input label is initialized with a string, it can now be removed by updating with label=character(0) (similar to how choices and selected can be cleared in updateSelectInput()). (#2406)

  • Fixed #2250: updateSliderInput() now works with un-specified (or zero-length) min, max, and value. (#2416)

  • Fixed #2396: selectInput("myID", ...) resulting in an extra myID-selectized input (introduced in v1.2.0). (#2418)

  • Fixed #2233: verbatimTextOutput() produced wrapped text on Safari, but the text should not be wrapped. (#2353)

  • Fixed #2335: When dateInput()’s value was unspecified, and max and/or min was set to Sys.Date(), the value was not being set properly. (#2526)

  • Fixed #2591: Providing malformed date-strings to min or max no longer results in JS errors for dateInput() and dateRangeInput(). (#2592)

  • Fixed rstudio/reactlog#36: Changes to reactive values not displaying accurately in reactlog. (#2424)

  • Fixed #2598: Showcase files don’t appear with a wide window. (#2582)

  • Fixed #2329, #1817: These bugs were reported as fixed in Shiny 1.3.0 but were not actually fixed because some JavaScript changes were accidentally not included in the release. The fix resolves issues that occur when withProgressBar() or bookmarking are combined with the networkD3 package’s Sankey plot.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #2385: Static CSS/JS resources in subapps in R Markdown documents did not render properly. (#2386)

  • Fixed #2280: Shiny applications that used a www/index.html file did not serve up the index file. (#2382)

Full changelog

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a performance issue introduced in v1.3.0 when using large nested lists within Shiny. (#2377)

Full changelog

Breaking changes

New features

  • Revamped Shiny’s reactlog viewer which debugs reactivity within a shiny application. This allows users to traverse the reactivity history of a shiny application, filter to the dependency tree of a selected reactive object, and search for matching reactive objects. See ?reactlogShow for more details and how to enable this feature. (#2107)

  • Shiny now serves static files on a background thread. This means that things like JavaScript and CSS assets can be served without blocking or being blocked by the main R thread, and should result in significantly better performance for heavily loaded servers. (#2280)

Minor new features and improvements

  • The Shiny-Shared-Secret security header is now checked using constant-time comparison to prevent timing attacks (thanks @dirkschumacher!). (#2319)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #2245: updateSelectizeInput() did not update labels. (#2248)

  • Fixed #2308: When restoring a bookmarked application, inputs with a leading . would not be restored. (#2311)

  • Fixed #2305, #2322, #2351: When an input in dynamic UI is restored from bookmarks, it would keep getting set to the same value. (#2360)

  • Fixed #2349, #2329, #1817: These were various bugs triggered by the presence of the networkD3 package’s Sankey plot in an app. Impacted features included dateRangeInput, withProgressBar, and bookmarking (#2359)

Documentation Updates

  • Fixed #2247: renderCachedPlot now supports using promises for either expr or cacheKeyExpr. (Shiny v1.2.0 supported async expr, but only if cacheKeyExpr was async as well; now you can use any combination of sync/async for expr and cacheKeyExpr.) #2261

This release features plot caching, an important new tool for improving performance and scalability. Using renderCachedPlot in place of renderPlot can greatly improve responsiveness for apps that show the same plot many times (for example, a dashboard or report where all users view the same data). Shiny gives you a fair amount of control in where the cache is stored and how cached plots are invalidated, so be sure to read this article to get the most out of this feature.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • The URL paths for FontAwesome CSS/JS/font assets have changed, due to our upgrade from FontAwesome 4 to 5. This shouldn’t affect you unless you’re using www/index.html to provide your UI and have hardcoded the old FontAwesome paths into your HTML. If that’s you, consider switching to HTML templates, which give you the syntax of raw HTML while still taking advantage of Shiny’s automatic management of web dependencies.

New features

Minor new features and improvements

  • Upgrade FontAwesome from 4.7.0 to 5.3.1 and made icon tags browsable, which means they will display in a web browser or RStudio viewer by default (#2186). Note that if your application or library depends on FontAwesome directly using custom CSS, you may need to make some or all of the changes recommended in Upgrade from Version 4. Font Awesome icons can also now be used in static R Markdown documents.

  • Address #174: Added datesdisabled and daysofweekdisabled as new parameters to dateInput(). This resolves #174 and exposes the underlying arguments of Bootstrap Datepicker. datesdisabled expects a character vector with values in yyyy/mm/dd format and daysofweekdisabled expects an integer vector with day interger ids (Sunday=0, Saturday=6). The default value for both is NULL, which leaves all days selectable. Thanks, @nathancday! (#2147)

  • Support for selecting variables of a data frame with the output values to be used within tidy evaluation. Added functions: varSelectInput, varSelectizeInput, updateVarSelectInput, updateVarSelectizeInput. (#2091)

  • Addressed #2042: dates outside of min/max date range are now a lighter shade of grey to highlight the allowed range. (#2087)

  • Added support for plot interaction when the plot is scaled. (#2125)

  • Fixed #1933: extended server-side selectize to lists and optgroups. (#2102)

  • Added namespace support when freezing reactiveValue keys. #2080

  • Upgrade selectize.js from 0.12.1 to 0.12.4 #2028

  • Addressed #2079: Added coords_img, coords_css, and img_css_ratio fields containing x and y location information for plot brush, hover, and click events. #2183

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #2033: RStudio Viewer window not closed on shiny::stopApp(). Thanks, @vnijs! #2047

  • Fixed #1935: correctly returns plot coordinates when using outer margins. (#2108)

  • Resolved #2019: updateSliderInput now changes the slider formatting if the input type changes. (#2099)

  • Fixed #2138: Inputs that are part of a renderUI were no longer restoring correctly from bookmarked state. #2139

  • The knit_print methods from htmltools are no longer imported into shiny and then exported. Also, shiny’s knit_print methods are no longer exported. #2166

  • Fixed #2093: Make sure bookmark scope directory does not exist before trying to create it. #2168

  • Fixed #2177: The session name is now being recorded when exiting a context. Multiple sessions can now view their respective reactlogs. #2180

  • Fixed #2162: selectInput was sending spurious duplicate values to the server when using backspace. Thanks, @sada1993! #2187

  • Fixed #2142: Dropping files on fileInputs stopped working on recent releases of Firefox. Thanks @dmenne for reporting! #2203

  • Fixed #2204: updateDateInput could set the wrong date on days where DST begins. (Thanks @GaGaMan1101!) #2212

  • Fixed #2225: Input event queue can stall in apps that use async. #2226

  • Fixed #2228: reactiveTimer fails when not owned by a session. Thanks, @P-Bettega! #2229

Documentation Updates

  • Addressed #1864 by changing optgroup documentation to use list instead of c. (#2084)

This is a significant release for Shiny, with a major new feature that was nearly a year in the making: support for asynchronous operations! Until now, R’s single-threaded nature meant that performing long-running calculations or tasks from Shiny would bring your app to a halt for other users of that process. This release of Shiny deeply integrates the promises package to allow you to execute some tasks asynchronously, including as part of reactive expressions and outputs. See the promises documentation to learn more.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • extractStackTrace and formatStackTrace are deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Shiny. As far as we can tell, nobody has been using these functions, and a refactor has made them vestigial; if you need this functionality, please file an issue.

New features

  • Support for asynchronous operations! Built-in render functions that expected a certain kind of object to be yielded from their expr, now generally can handle a promise for that kind of object. Reactive expressions and observers are now promise-aware as well. (#1932)

  • Introduced two changes to the (undocumented but widely used) JavaScript function Shiny.onInputChange(name, value). First, we changed the function name to Shiny.setInputValue (but don’t worry–the old function name will continue to work). Second, until now, all calls to Shiny.onInputChange(inputId, value) have been “deduplicated”; that is, anytime an input is set to the same value it already has, the set is ignored. With Shiny v1.1, you can now add an options object as the third parameter: Shiny.setInputValue("name", value, {priority: "event"}). When the priority option is set to "event", Shiny will always send the value and trigger reactivity, whether it is a duplicate or not. This closes #928, which was the most upvoted open issue by far! Thanks, @daattali. (#2018)

Minor new features and improvements

  • Addressed #1978: shiny:value is now triggered when duplicate output data is received from the server. (Thanks, @andrewsali! #1999)

  • If a shiny output contains a css class of shiny-report-size, its container height and width are now reported in session$clientData. So, for an output with an id with "myID", the height/width can be accessed via session$clientData[['output_myID_height']]/session$clientData[['output_myID_width']]. Addresses #1980. (Thanks, @cpsievert! #1981)

  • Added a new autoclose = TRUE parameter to dateInput() and dateRangeInput(). This closed #1969 which was a duplicate of much older issue, #173. The default value is TRUE since that seems to be the common use case. However, this will cause existing apps with date inputs (that update to this version of Shiny) to have the datepicker be immediately closed once a date is selected. For most apps, this is actually desired behavior; if you wish to keep the datepicker open until the user clicks out of it use autoclose = FALSE. (#1987)

  • The version of Shiny is now accessible from Javascript, with Shiny.version. There is also a new function for comparing version strings, Shiny.compareVersion(). (#1826, #1830)

  • Addressed #1851: Stack traces are now smaller in some places do.call() is used. (#1856)

  • Stack traces have been improved, with more aggressive de-noising and support for deep stack traces (stitching together multiple stack traces that are conceptually part of the same async operation).

  • Addressed #1859: Server-side selectize is now significantly faster. (Thanks to @dselivanov #1861)

  • #1989: The server side of outputs can now be removed (e.g. output$plot <- NULL). This is not usually necessary but it does allow some objects to be garbage collected, which might matter if you are dynamically creating and destroying many outputs. (Thanks, @mmuurr! #2011)

  • Removed the (ridiculously outdated) “experimental feature” tag from the reference documentation for renderUI. (#2036)

  • Addressed #1907: the ignoreInit argument was first added only to observeEvent. Later, we also added it to eventReactive, but forgot to update the documentation. Now done, thanks @flo12392! (#2036)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1006: Slider inputs sometimes showed too many digits. (#1956)

  • Fixed #1958: Slider inputs previously displayed commas after a decimal point. (#1960)

  • The internal URLdecode() function previously was a copy of httpuv::decodeURIComponent(), assigned at build time; now it invokes the httpuv function at run time.

  • Fixed #1840: with the release of Shiny 1.0.5, we accidently changed the relative positioning of the icon and the title text in navbarMenus and tabPanels. This fix reverts this behavior back (i.e. the icon should be to the left of the text and/or the downward arrow in case of navbarMenus). (#1848)

  • Fixed #1600: URL-encoded bookmarking did not work with sliders that had dates or date-times. (#1961)

  • Fixed #1962: File dragging and dropping broke in the presence of jQuery version 3.0 as introduced by the rhandsontable htmlwidget. (#2005)

  • Improved the error handling inside the addResourcePath() function, to give end users more informative error messages when the directoryPath argument cannot be normalized. This is especially useful for runtime: shiny_prerendered Rmd documents, like learnr tutorials. (#1968)

  • Changed script tags in reactlog (inst/www/reactive-graph.html) from HTTP to HTTPS in order to avoid mixed content blocking by most browsers. (Thanks, @jekriske-lilly! #1844)

  • Addressed #1784: runApp() will avoid port 6697, which is considered unsafe by Chrome.

  • Fixed #2000: Implicit calls to xxxOutput not working inside modules. (Thanks, @GregorDeCillia! #2010)

  • Fixed #2021: Memory leak with reactiveTimer and invalidateLater. (#2022)

Library updates

  • Updated to ion.rangeSlider 2.2.0. (#1955)

Known issues

In some rare cases, interrupting an application (by pressing Ctrl-C or Esc) may result in the message Error in execCallbacks(timeoutSecs) : c++ exception (unknown reason). Although this message sounds alarming, it is harmless, and will go away in a future version of the later package (more information here).

Full changelog

Bug fixes

There are three headlining features in this release of Shiny. It is now possible to add and remove tabs from a tabPanel; there is a new function, onStop(), which registers callbacks that execute when an application exits; and fileInputs now can have files dragged and dropped on them. In addition to these features, this release has a number of minor features and bug fixes. See the full changelog below for more details.

Full changelog

New features

  • Implemented #1668: dynamic tabs: added functions (insertTab, appendTab, prependTab, removeTab, showTab and hideTab) that allow you to do those actions for an existing tabsetPanel. (#1794)

  • Implemented #1213: Added a new function, onStop(), which can be used to register callback functions that are invoked when an application exits, or when a user session ends. (Multiple sessions can be connected to a single running Shiny application.) This is useful if you have finalization/clean-up code that should be run after the application exits. (#1770

  • Implemented #1155: Files can now be drag-and-dropped on fileInput controls. The appearance of fileInput controls while files are being dragged can be modified by overriding the shiny-file-input-active and shiny-file-input-over classes. (#1782)

Minor new features and improvements

  • Addressed #1688: trigger a new shiny:outputinvalidated event when an output gets invalidated, at the same time that the recalculating CSS class is added. (#1758, thanks @andrewsali!)

  • Addressed #1508: fileInput now permits the same file to be uploaded multiple times. (#1719)

  • Addressed #1501: The fileInput control now retains uploaded file extensions on the server. This fixes readxl’s readxl::read_excel and other functions that must recognize a file’s extension in order to work. (#1706)

  • For conditionalPanels, Shiny now gives more informative messages if there are errors evaluating or parsing the JavaScript conditional expression. (#1727)

  • Addressed #1586: The conditionalPanel function now accepts an ns argument. The ns argument can be used in a module UI function to scope the condition expression to the module’s own input and output IDs. (#1735)

  • With options(shiny.testmode=TRUE), the Shiny process will send a message to the client in response to a changed input, even if no outputs have changed. This helps to streamline testing using the shinytest package. (#1747)

  • Addressed #1738: The updateTextInput and updateTextAreaInput functions can now update the placeholder. (#1742)

  • Converted examples to single file apps, and made updates and enhancements to comments in the example app scripts. (#1685)

  • Added new snapshotPreprocessInput() and snapshotPreprocessOutput() functions, which is used for preprocessing and input and output values before taking a test snapshot. (#1760, #1789)

  • The HTML generated by renderTable() no longer includes comments with the R version, xtable version, and timestamp. (#1771)

  • Added a function isRunning to test whether a Shiny app is currently running. (#1785)

  • Added a function setSerializer, which allows authors to specify a function for serializing the value of a custom input. (#1791)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1546: make it possible (without any hacks) to write arbitrary data into a module’s session$userData (which is exactly the same environment as the parent’s session$userData). To be clear, it allows something like session$userData$x <- TRUE, but not something like session$userData <- TRUE (that is not allowed in any context, whether you’re in the main app, or in a module) (#1732).

  • Fixed #1701: There was a partial argument match in the generateOptions function. (#1702)

  • Fixed #1710: ReactiveVal objects did not have separate dependents. (#1712)

  • Fixed #1438: unbindAll() should not be called when inserting content with insertUI(). A previous fix (#1449) did not work correctly. (#1736)

  • Fixed #1755: dynamic htmlwidgets sent the path of the package on the server to the client. (#1756)

  • Fixed #1763: Shiny’s private random stream leaked out into the main random stream. (#1768)

  • Fixed #1680: options(warn=2) was not respected when running an app. (#1790)

  • Fixed #1772: ensure that runApp() respects the shinyApp(onStart = function()) argument. (#1770)

  • Fixed #1474: A browser() call in an observer could cause an error in the RStudio IDE on Windows. (#1802)

This is a hotfix release of Shiny. With previous versions of Shiny, when running an application on the newly-released version of R, 3.4.0, it would print a message: Warning in body(fun) : argument is not a function. This has no effect on the application, but because the message could be alarming to users, we are releasing a new version of Shiny that fixes this issue.

Full changelog

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1672: When an error occurred while uploading a file, the progress bar did not change colors. (#1673)

  • Fixed #1676: On R 3.4.0, running a Shiny application gave a warning: Warning in body(fun) : argument is not a function. (#1677)

This is a hotfix release of Shiny. The primary reason for this release is because the web host for MathJax JavaScript library is scheduled to be shut down in the next few weeks. After it is shut down, Shiny applications that use MathJax will no longer be able to load the MathJax library if they are run with Shiny 1.0.1 and below. (If you don’t know whether your application uses MathJax, it probably does not.) For more information about why the MathJax CDN is shutting down, see https://www.mathjax.org/cdn-shutting-down/.

Full changelog

Minor new features and improvements

  • Added a shiny:sessioninitialized Javascript event, which is fired at the end of the initialize method of the Session object. This allows us to listen for this event when we want to get the value of things like Shiny.user. (#1568)

  • Fixed #1649: allow the choices argument in checkboxGroupInput() to be NULL (or c()) to keep backward compatibility with Shiny < 1.0.1. This will result in the same thing as providing choices = character(0). (#1652)

  • The official URL for accessing MathJax libraries over CDN has been deprecated and will be removed soon. We have switched to a new rstudio.com URL that we will support going forward. (#1664)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1653: wrong code example in documentation. (#1658)

This is a maintenance release of Shiny, mostly aimed at fixing bugs and introducing minor features. The most notable additions in this version of Shiny are the introduction of the reactiveVal() function (it’s like reactiveValues(), but it only stores a single value), and that the choices of radioButtons() and checkboxGroupInput() can now contain HTML content instead of just plain text.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • The functions radioButtons(), checkboxGroupInput() and selectInput() (and the corresponding updateXXX() functions) no longer accept a selected argument whose value is the name of a choice, instead of the value of the choice. This feature had been deprecated since Shiny 0.10 (it printed a warning message, but still tried to match the name to the right choice) and it’s now completely unsupported.

New features

  • Added reactiveVal function, for storing a single value which can be (reactively) read and written. Similar to reactiveValues, except that reactiveVal just lets you store a single value instead of storing multiple values by name. (#1614)

Minor new features and improvements

  • Fixed #1637: Outputs stay faded on MS Edge. (#1640)

  • Addressed #1348 and #1437 by adding two new arguments to radioButtons() and checkboxGroupInput(): choiceNames (list or vector) and choiceValues (list or vector). These can be passed in as an alternative to choices, with the added benefit that the elements in choiceNames can be arbitrary UI (i.e. anything created by HTML() and the tags() functions, like icons and images). While the underlying values for each choice (passed in through choiceValues) must still be simple text, their visual representation on the app (what the user actually clicks to select a different option) can be any valid HTML element. See ?radioButtons for a small example. (#1521)

  • Updated tools/README.md with more detailed instructions. (#1616)

  • Fixed #1565, which meant that resources with spaces in their names return HTTP 404. (#1566)

  • Exported session$user (if it exists) to the client-side; it’s accessible in the Shiny object: Shiny.user. (#1563)

  • Added support for HTML5’s pushState which allows for pseudo-navigation in shiny apps. For more info, see the documentation (?updateQueryString and ?getQueryString). (#1447)

  • Fixed #1121: plot interactions with ggplot2 now support coord_fixed(). (#1525)

  • Added snapshotExclude function, which marks an output so that it is not recorded in a test snapshot. (#1559)

  • Added shiny:filedownload JavaScript event, which is triggered when a downloadButton or downloadLink is clicked. Also, the values of downloadHandlers are not recorded in test snapshots, because the values change every time the application is run. (#1559)

  • Added support for plot interactions with ggplot2 > 2.2.1. (#1578)

  • Fixed #1577: Improved escapeHTML (util.js) in terms of the order dependency of replacing, XSS risk attack and performance. (#1579)

  • The shiny:inputchanged JavaScript event now includes two new fields, binding and el, which contain the input binding and DOM element, respectively. Additionally, Shiny.onInputChange() now accepts an optional argument, opts, which can contain the same fields. (#1596)

  • The NS() function now returns a vectorized function. (#1613)

  • Fixed #1617: fileInput can have customized text for the button and the placeholder. (#1619)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1511: fileInputs did not trigger the shiny:inputchanged event on the client. Also removed shiny:fileuploaded JavaScript event, because it is no longer needed after this fix. (#1541, #1570)

  • Fixed #1472: With a Progress object, calling set(value=NULL) made the progress bar go to 100%. Now it does not change the value of the progress bar. The documentation also incorrectly said that setting the value to NULL would hide the progress bar. (#1547)

  • Fixed #162: When a dynamically-generated input changed to a different inputType, it might be incorrectly deduplicated. (#1594)

  • Removed redundant call to inputs.setInput. (#1595)

  • Fixed bug where dateRangeInput did not respect weekstart argument. (#1592)

  • Fixed #1598: setBookmarkExclude() did not work properly inside of modules. (#1599)

  • Fixed #1605: sliders did not move when clicked on the bar area. (#1610)

  • Fixed #1621: if a reactiveTimer’s session was closed before the first time that the reactiveTimer fired, then the reactiveTimer would not get cleared and would keep firing indefinitely. (#1623)

  • Fixed #1634: If brushing on a plot causes the plot to redraw, then the redraw could in turn trigger the plot to redraw again and again. This was due to spurious changes in values of floating point numbers. (#1641)

Library updates

  • Closed #1500: Updated ion.rangeSlider to 2.1.6. (#1540)

Shiny has reached a milestone: version 1.0.0! In the last year, we’ve added two major features that we considered essential for a 1.0.0 release: bookmarking, and support for testing Shiny applications. As usual, this version of Shiny also includes many minor features and bug fixes.

Here are some highlights from this release. For more details, see the full changelog below.

Support for testing Shiny applications

Shiny now supports automated testing of applications, with the shinytest package. Shinytest has not yet been released on CRAN, but will be soon. (#18, #1464)

Debounce/throttle reactives

Now there’s an official way to slow down reactive values and expressions that invalidate too quickly. Pass a reactive expression to the new debounce or throttle function, and get back a modified reactive expression that doesn’t invalidate as often. (#1510)

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Added a new placeholder argument to verbatimTextOutput(). The default is FALSE, which means that, if there is no content for this output, no representation of this slot will be made in the UI. Previsouly, even if there was no content, you’d see an empty rectangle in the UI that served as a placeholder. You can set placeholder = TRUE to revert back to that look. (#1480)

New features

  • Added support for testing Shiny applications with the shinytest package. (#18, #1464)

  • Added debounce and throttle functions, to control the rate at which reactive values and expressions invalidate. (#1510)

Minor new features and improvements

  • Addressed #1486 by adding a new argument to observeEvent and eventReactive, called ignoreInit (defaults to FALSE for backwards compatibility). When set to TRUE, the action (i.e. the second argument: handlerExpr and valueExpr, respectively) will not be triggered when the observer/reactive is first created/initialized. In other words, ignoreInit = TRUE ensures that the observeEvent (or eventReactive) is never run right away. For more info, see the documentation (?observeEvent). (#1494)

  • Added a new argument to observeEvent called once. When set to TRUE, it results in the observer being destroyed (stop observing) after the first time that handlerExpr is run (i.e. once = TRUE guarantees that the observer only runs, at most, once). For more info, see the documentation (?observeEvent). (#1494)

  • Addressed #1358: more informative error message when calling runApp() inside of an app’s app.R (or inside ui.R or server.R). (#1482)

  • Added a more descriptive JS warning for insertUI() when the selector argument does not match anything in DOM. (#1488)

  • Added support for injecting JavaScript code when the shiny.testmode option is set to TRUE. This makes it possible to record test events interactively. (#1464)

  • Added ability through arguments to the a tag function called inside downloadButton() and downloadLink(). Closes #986. (#1492)

  • Implemented #1512: added a userData environment to session, for storing arbitrary session-related variables. Generally, session-scoped variables are created just by declaring normal variables that are local to the Shiny server function, but session$userData may be more convenient for some advanced scenarios. (#1513)

  • Relaxed naming requirements for addResourcePath() (the first character no longer needs to be a letter). (#1529)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #969: allow navbarPage’s fluid param to control both containers. (#1481)

  • Fixed #1438: unbindAll() should not be called when inserting content with insertUI() (#1449)

  • Fixed bug causing <meta> tags associated with HTML dependencies of Shiny R Markdown files to be rendered incorrectly. (#1463)

  • Fixed #1359: shinyApp() options argument ignored when passed to runApp(). (#1483)

  • Fixed #117: Reactive expressions now release references to cached values as soon as they are invalidated, potentially making those cached values eligible for garbage collection sooner. Previously, this would not occur until the next cached value was calculated and stored. (#1504)

  • Fixed #1013: flushReact should be called after app loads. Observers set up outside of server functions were not running until after the first user connects. (#1503)

  • Fixed #1453: When using a modal dialog with easyClose=TRUE in a Shiny gadget, pressing Esc would close both the modal and the gadget. Now pressing Esc only closes the modal. (#1523)

Library updates

  • Updated to Font Awesome 4.7.0.

This is a maintenance release of Shiny, with some bug fixes and minor new features.

Full changelog

Minor new features and improvements

  • Added a fade argument to modalDialog() – setting it to FALSE will remove the usual fade-in animation for that modal window. (#1414)

  • Fixed a “duplicate binding” error that occurred in some edge cases involving insertUI and nested uiOutput. (#1402)

  • Fixed #1422: When using the shiny.trace option, allow specifying to only log SEND or RECV messages, or both. (PR #1428)

  • Fixed #1419: Allow overriding a JS custom message handler. (PR #1445)

  • Added exportTestValues() function, which allows a test driver to query the session for values internal to an application’s server function. This only has an effect if the shiny.testmode option is set to TRUE. (#1436)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1427: make sure that modals do not close incorrectly when an element inside them is triggered as hidden. (#1430)

  • Fixed #1404: stack trace tests were not compatible with the byte-code compiler in R-devel, which now tracks source references.

  • sliderInputBinding.setValue() now sends a slider’s value immediately, instead of waiting for the usual 250ms debounce delay. (#1429)

  • Fixed a bug where, in versions of R before 3.2, Shiny applications could crash due to a bug in R’s implementation of list2env(). (#1446)

This is a maintenance release of Shiny, with some bug fixes and minor new features.

Full changelog

Minor new features and improvements

  • Restored file inputs are now copied on restore, so that the restored application can’t modify the bookmarked file. (#1370)

  • Added support for plot interaction in the development version of ggplot2, 2.1.0.9000. Also added support for ggplot2 plots with coord_flip() (in the development version of ggplot2). (hadley/ggplot2#1781, #1392)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1093 better: updateRadioButtons() and updateCheckboxGroupInput() were not working correctly if the choices were given as a numeric vector. This had been solved in #1291, but that introduced a different bug #1396 that this better fix avoids. (#1370)

  • Fixed #1368: If an app with a file input was bookmarked and restored, and then the restored app was bookmarked and restored (without uploading a new file), then it would fail to restore the file the second time. (#1370)

  • Fixed #1369: sliderInput() did not allow showing numbers without a thousands separator.

  • Fixed #1346 and #1107 : jQuery UI’s datepicker conflicted with the bootstrap-datepicker used by Shiny’s dateInput() and dateRangeInput(). (#1374)

Library updates

  • Updated to bootstrap-datepicker 1.6.4. (#1218, #1374)

  • Updated to jQuery UI 1.12.1. Previously, Shiny included a build of 1.11.4 which was missing the datepicker component due to a conflict with the bootstrap-datepicker used by Shiny’s dateInput() and dateRangeInput(). (#1374)

A new Shiny release is upon us! There are many new exciting features, bug fixes, and library updates. We’ll just highlight the most important changes here, but you can browse through the full changelog below for details. This will likely be the last release before shiny 1.0, so get out your party hats!

Bookmarkable state

Shiny now supports bookmarkable state: users can save the state of an application and get a URL which will restore the application with that state. There are two types of bookmarking: encoding the state in a URL, and saving the state to the server. With an encoded state, the entire state of the application is contained in the URL’s query string. You can see this in action with this app: https://gallery.shinyapps.io/113-bookmarking-url/. An example of a bookmark URL for this app is https://gallery.shinyapps.io/113-bookmarking-url/?_inputs_&n=200. When the state is saved to the server, the URL might look something like: https://gallery.shinyapps.io/bookmark-saved/?_state_id_=d80625dc681e913a (note that this URL is not for an active app).

Important note: > Saved-to-server bookmarking currently works with Shiny Server Open Source. Support on Shiny Server Pro, RStudio Connect, and shinyapps.io is under development and testing. However, URL-encoded bookmarking works on all hosting platforms.

See this article to get started with bookmarkable state. There is also an advanced-level article (for apps that have a complex state), and a modules article that details how to use bookmarking in conjunction with modules.

Notifications

Shiny can now display notifications on the client browser by using the showNotification() function. Use this demo app to play around with the notification API. Here’s a screenshot of a very simple notification (shown when the button is clicked):

notification

Here’s our article about it, and the reference documentation.

Progress indicators

If your Shiny app contains computations that take a long time to complete, a progress bar can improve the user experience by communicating how far along the computation is, and how much is left. Progress bars were added in Shiny 0.10.2. In Shiny 0.14, they were changed to use the notifications system, which gives them a different look.

Important note: > If you were already using progress bars and had customized them with your own CSS, you can add the style = "old" argument to your withProgress() call (or Progress$new()). This will result in the same appearance as before. You can also call shinyOptions(progress.style = "old") in your app’s server function to make all progress indicators use the old styling.

To see new progress bars in action, see this app in the gallery. You can also learn more about this in our article and in the reference documentation (either for the easier withProgress functional API or the more complicated, but more powerful, Progress object-oriented API.

Reconnection

Shiny can now automatically reconnect to your Shiny session if you temporarily lose network access.

Shiny has now built-in support for displaying modal dialogs like the one below (live app here):

modal-dialog

To learn more about this, read our article and the reference documentation.

insertUI and removeUI

Sometimes in a Shiny app, arbitrary HTML UI may need to be created on-the-fly in response to user input. The existing uiOutput and renderUI functions let you continue using reactive logic to call UI functions and make the results appear in a predetermined place in the UI. The insertUI and removeUI functions, which are used in the server code, allow you to use imperative logic to add and remove arbitrary chunks of HTML (all independent from one another), as many times as you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. This option may be more convenient when you want to, for example, add a new model to your app each time the user selects a different option (and leave previous models unchanged, rather than substitute the previous one for the latest one).

See this simple demo app of how one could use insertUI and removeUI to insert and remove text elements using a queue. Also see this other app that demonstrates how to insert and remove a few common Shiny input objects. Finally, this app shows how to dynamically insert modules using insertUI.

For more, read our article about dynamic UI generation and the reference documentation about insertUI and removeUI.

Documentation for connecting to an external database

Many Shiny users have asked about best practices for accessing external databases from their Shiny applications. Although database access has long been possible using various database connector packages in R, it can be challenging to use them robustly in the dynamic environment that Shiny provides. So far, it has been mostly up to application authors to find the appropriate database drivers and to discover how to manage the database connections within an application. In order to demystify this process, we wrote a series of articles (first one here) that covers the basics of connecting to an external database, as well as some security precautions to keep in mind (e.g. how to avoid SQL injection attacks).

There are a few packages that you should look at if you’re using a relational database in a Shiny app: the dplyr and DBI packages (both featured in the article linked to above), and the brand new pool package, which provides a further layer of abstraction to make it easier and safer to use either DBI or dplyr. pool is not yet on CRAN. In particular, pool will take care of managing connections, preventing memory leaks, and ensuring the best performance. See this pool basics article and the more advanced-level article if you’re feeling adventurous! (Both of these articles contain Shiny app examples that use DBI to connect to an external MySQL database.) If you are more comfortable with dplyr than DBI, don’t miss the article about the integration of pool and dplyr.

If you’re new to databases in the Shiny world, we recommend using dplyr and pool if possible. If you need greater control than dplyr offers (for example, if you need to modify data in the database or use transactions), then use DBI and pool. The pool package was introduced to make your life easier, but in no way constrains you, so we don’t envision any situation in which you’d be better off not using it. The only caveat is that pool is not yet on CRAN, so you may prefer to wait for that.

Others

There are many more minor features, small improvements, and bug fixes than we can cover here, so we’ll just mention a few of the more noteworthy ones (the full changelog, with links to all the relevant issues and pull requests, is right below this section):

  • Error Sanitization: you now have the option to sanitize error messages; in other words, the content of the original error message can be suppressed so that it doesn’t leak any sensitive information. To sanitize errors everywhere in your app, just add options(shiny.sanitize.errors = TRUE) somewhere in your app. Read this article for more, or play with the demo app.

  • Code Diagnostics: if there is an error parsing ui.R, server.R, app.R, or global.R, Shiny will search the code for missing commas, extra commas, and unmatched braces, parens, and brackets, and will print out messages pointing out those problems. (#1126)

  • Reactlog visualization: by default, the showReactLog() function (which brings up the reactive graph) also displays the time that each reactive and observer were active for:

    modal-dialog

    This new feature can be turned off with showReactLog(time = FALSE). This may be convenient if you have a large graph and don’t want to have this new information cluttering it up. The elapsed time info shows up above each relevant node’s label, and the time is also coded by color: the slowest reactive will be dark red and the fastest will be light red.

    Additionally, to organize the graph, you can now drag any of the nodes to a specific position and leave it there.

  • Nicer-looking tables: we’ve made tables generated with renderTable() look cleaner and more modern. While this won’t break any older code, the finished look of your table will be quite a bit different, as the following image shows:

    render-table

    For more, read our short article about this update, experiment with all the new features in this demo app, or check out the reference documentation.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

  • Progress indicators can now either use the new notification API, using style = "notification" (default), or be displayed with the previous styling, using style = "old". You can also call shinyOptions(progress.style = "old") in the server function to make all progress indicators use the old styling. Note that if you had customized your progress indicators with additional CSS, you’ll need to use the old style if you want your UI to look the same (#1160 and #1329).

  • Closed #1161: Deprecated the position argument to tabsetPanel() since Bootstrap 3 stopped supporting this feature.

  • The long-deprecated ability to pass a func argument to many of the render functions has been removed.

New features

  • Added the ability to bookmark and restore application state. (main PR: #1209)

  • Added a new notification API. From R, there are new functions showNotification and hideNotification. From JavaScript, there is a new Shiny.notification object that controls notifications. (#1141)

  • Progress indicators now use the notification API. (#1160)

  • Added the ability for the client browser to reconnect to a new session on the server, by setting session$allowReconnect(TRUE). This requires a version of Shiny Server that supports reconnections. (#1074)

  • Added modal dialogs. (#1157)

  • Added insertUI and removeUI functions to be able to add and remove chunks of UI, standalone, and all independent of one another. (#1174 and #1189)

  • Improved renderTable() function to make the tables look prettier and also provide the user with a lot more parameters to customize their tables with. (#1129)

  • Added support for the pool package (use Shiny’s timer/scheduler). (#1226)

Minor new features and improvements

  • Added cancelOutput argument to req(). This causes the currently executing reactive to cancel its execution, and leave its previous state alone (as opposed to clearing the output). (#1272)

  • Display: Showcase now displays the .js, .html and .css files in the www directory by default. In order to use showcase mode and not display these, include a new line in your Description file: IncludeWWW: False. (#1185)

  • Added an error sanitization option: options(shiny.sanitize.errors = TRUE). By default, this option is FALSE. When TRUE, normal errors will be sanitized, displaying only a generic error message. This changes the look of an app when errors are printed (but the console log remains the same). (#1156)

  • Added the option of passing arguments to an xxxOutput() function through the corresponding renderXXX() function via an outputArgs parameter to the latter. This is only valid for snippets of Shiny code in an interactive runtime: shiny Rmd document (never for full apps, even if embedded in an Rmd). (#1443)

  • Added updateActionButton() function, so the user can change an actionButton’s (or actionLink’s) label and/or icon. It also checks that the icon argument (for both creation and updating of a button) is valid and throws a warning otherwise. (#1134)

  • Added code diagnostics: if there is an error parsing ui.R, server.R, app.R, or global.R, Shiny will search the code for missing commas, extra commas, and unmatched braces, parens, and brackets, and will print out messages pointing out those problems. (#1126)

  • Added support for horizontal dividers in navbarMenu. (#1147)

  • Added placeholder option to passwordInput. (#1152)

  • Added session$resetBrush(brushId) (R) and Shiny.resetBrush(brushId) (JS) to programatically clear brushes from imageOutput/plotOutput. (#1197)

  • Added textAreaInput. (thanks, @nuno-agostinho! #1300)

  • Added session$sendBinaryMessage(type, message) method for sending custom binary data to the client. See ?session. (thanks, @daef! #1316 and #1320)

  • Almost all code examples now have a runnable example with shinyApp(), so that users can run the examples and see them in action. (#1158)

  • When resized, plots are drawn with replayPlot(), instead of re-executing all plotting code. This results in faster plot rendering. (#1112)

  • Exported the isTruthy() function. (part of PR #1272)

  • Reactive log now shows elapsed time for reactives and observers. (#1132)

  • Nodes in the reactlog visualization are now sticky if the user drags them. (#1283)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed #1350: Highlighting of reactives didn’t work in showcase mode.

  • Fixed #1331: renderPlot() now correctly records and replays plots when execOnResize = FALSE.

  • updateDateInput() and updateDateRangeInput() can now clear the date input fields. (thanks, @gaborcsardi! #1299, #1315 and #1317)

  • Fixed #561: DataTables previously might pop up a warning when the data was updated extremely frequently.

  • Fixed #776: In some browsers, plots sometimes flickered when updated.

  • Fixed #543 and #855: When navbarPage() had a navbarMenu() as the first item, it did not automatically select an item.

  • Fixed #970: navbarPage() previously did not have an option to set the selected tab.

  • Fixed #1253: Memory could leak when an observer was destroyed without first being invalidated.

  • Fixed #931: Nested observers could leak memory.

  • Fixed #1144: updateRadioButton() and updateCheckboxGroupInput() broke controls when used in modules (thanks, @sipemu!).

  • Fixed #1093: updateRadioButtons() and updateCheckboxGroupInput() didn’t work if choices was numeric vector.

  • Fixed #1122: downloadHandler() popped up empty browser window if the file wasn’t present. It now gives a 404 error code.

  • Fixed #1278: Reactive system was being flushed too often (usually this just means a more-expensive no-op than necessary).

  • Fixed #803 and #1179: handling malformed dates in dateInput and updateDateInput().

  • Fixed #1257: updateSelectInput() didn’t work correctly in IE 11 and Edge.

  • Fixed #971: runApp() would give confusing error if port was not numeric.

  • Shiny now avoids using ports that Chrome deems unsafe. (#1222)

  • Added workaround for quartz graphics device resolution bug, where resolution is hard-coded to 72 ppi.

Library updates

  • Updated to ion.RangeSlider 2.1.2.

  • Updated to Font Awesome 4.6.3.

  • Updated to Bootstrap 3.3.7.

  • Updated to jQuery 1.12.4.

  • Updated documentation for htmlTemplate.
  • flexCol did not work on RStudio for Windows or Linux.

  • Fixed RStudio debugger integration.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: The long-deprecated ability to pass functions (rather than expressions) to reactive() and observe() has finally been removed.

  • Fixed #962: plot interactions did not work with the development version of ggplot2 (after ggplot2 1.0.1).

  • Fixed #902: the drag_drop plugin of the selectize input did not work.

  • Fixed #933: updateSliderInput() does not work when only the label is updated.

  • Multiple imageOutput/plotOutput calls can now share the same brush id. Shiny will ensure that performing a brush operation will clear any other brush with the same id.

  • Added placeholder option to textInput.

  • Improved support for Unicode characters on Windows (#968).

  • Fixed bug in selectInput and selectizeInput where values with double quotes were not properly escaped.

  • runApp() can now take a path to any .R file that yields a shinyApp object; previously, the path had to be a directory that contained an app.R file (or server.R if using separately defined server and UI). Similarly, introduced shinyAppFile() function which creates a shinyApp object for an .R file path, just as shinyAppDir() does for a directory path.

  • Introduced Shiny Modules, which are designed to 1) simplify the reuse of Shiny UI/server logic and 2) make authoring and maintaining complex Shiny apps much easier. See the article linked from ?callModule.

  • invalidateLater and reactiveTimer no longer require an explicit session argument; the default value uses the current session.

  • Added session$reload() method, the equivalent of hitting the browser’s Reload button.

  • Added shiny.autoreload option, which will automatically cause browsers to reload whenever Shiny app files change on disk. This is intended to shorten the feedback cycle when tweaking UI code.

  • Errors are now printed with stack traces! This should make it tremendously easier to track down the causes of errors in Shiny. Try it by calling stop("message") from within an output, reactive, or observer. Shiny itself adds a lot of noise to the call stack, so by default, it attempts to hide all but the relevant levels of the call stack. You can turn off this behavior by setting options(shiny.fullstacktrace=TRUE) before or during app startup.

  • Fixed #1018: the selected value of a selectize input is guaranteed to be selected in server-side mode.

  • Added req function, which provides a simple way to prevent a reactive, observer, or output from executing until all required inputs and values are available. (Similar functionality has been available for a while using validate/need, but req provides a much simpler and more direct interface.)

  • Improve stability with Shiny Server when many subapps are used, by deferring the loading of subapp iframes until a connection has first been established with the server.

  • Upgrade to Font Awesome 4.5.0.

  • Upgraded to Bootstrap 3.3.5.

  • Upgraded to jQuery 1.12.4

  • Switched to an almost-complete build of jQuery UI with the exception of the datepicker extension, which conflicts with Shiny’s date picker.

  • Added fillPage function, an alternative to fluidPage, fixedPage, etc. that is designed for apps that fill the entire available page width/height.

  • Added fillRow and fillCol functions, for laying out proportional grids in fillPage. For modern browsers only.

  • Added runGadget, paneViewer, dialogViewer, and browserViewer functions to support Shiny Gadgets. More detailed docs about gadgets coming soon.

  • Added support for the new htmltools 0.3 feature htmlTemplate. It’s now possible to use regular HTML markup to design your UI, but still use R expressions to define inputs, outputs, and HTML widgets.

  • GitHub changed URLs for gists from .tar.gz to .zip, so runGist was updated to work with the new URLs.

  • Callbacks from the session object are now guaranteed to execute in the order in which registration occurred.

  • Minor bugs in sliderInput’s animation behavior have been fixed. (#852)

  • Updated to ion.rangeSlider to 2.0.12.

  • Added shiny.minified option, which controls whether the minified version of shiny.js is used. Setting it to FALSe can be useful for debugging. (#826, #850)

  • Fixed an issue for outputting plots from ggplot objects which also have an additional class whose print method takes precedence over print.ggplot. (#840, 841)

  • Added width option to Shiny’s input functions. (#589, #834)

  • Added two alias functions of updateTabsetPanel() to update the selected tab: updateNavbarPage() and updateNavlistPanel(). (#881)

  • All non-base functions are now explicitly namespaced, to pass checks in R-devel.

  • Shiny now correctly handles HTTP HEAD requests. (#876)

  • Fixed an issue where unbindAll() causes subsequent bindAll() to be ignored for previously bound outputs. (#856)

  • Undeprecate dataTableOutput and renderDataTable, which had been deprecated in favor of the new DT package. The DT package is a bit too new and has a slightly different API, we were too hasty in deprecating the existing Shiny functions.

In addition to the changes listed below (in the Full Changelog section), there is an infrastructure change that could affect existing Shiny apps.

JSON serialization

In Shiny 0.12.0, we’ve switched from RJSONIO to jsonlite. For the vast majority of users, this will result in no noticeable changes; however, if you use any packages in your Shiny apps which rely on the htmlwidgets, you will also need to update htmlwidgets to 0.4.0. Both of these packages will issue a message when loaded, if the other package needs to be upgraded.

POSIXt objects are now serialized to JSON in UTC8601 format (like “2015-03-20T20:00:00Z”), instead of as seconds from the epoch. If you have a Shiny app which uses sendCustomMessage() to send datetime (POSIXt) objects, then you may need to modify your Javascript code to receive time data in this format.

A note about Data Tables

Shiny 0.12.0 deprecated Shiny’s dataTableOutput and renderDataTable functions and instructed you to migrate to the nascent DT package instead. (We’ll talk more about DT in a future blog post.) User feedback has indicated this transition was too sudden and abrupt, so we’ve undeprecated these functions in 0.12.1. We’ll continue to support these functions until DT has had more time to mature.

Full Changelog

  • Switched from RJSONIO to jsonlite. This improves consistency and speed when converting between R data structures and JSON. One notable change is that POSIXt objects are now serialized to JSON in UTC8601 format (like “2015-03-20T20:00:00Z”), instead of as seconds from the epoch).

  • In addition to the existing support for clicking and hovering on plots created by base graphics, added support for double-clicking and brushing. (#769)

  • Added support for clicking, hovering, double-clicking, and brushing for plots created by ggplot2, including support for facets. (#802)

  • Added nearPoints and brushedPoints functions for easily selecting rows of data that are clicked/hovered, or brushed. (#802)

  • Added shiny.port option. If this is option is set, runApp() will listen on this port by default. (#756)

  • runUrl, runGist, and runGitHub now can save downloaded applications, with the destdir argument. (#688)

  • Restored ability to set labels for selectInput. (#741)

  • Travis continuous integration now uses Travis’s native R support.

  • Fixed encoding issue when the server receives data from the client browser. (#742)

  • The session object now has class ShinySession, making it easier to test whether an object is indeed a session object. (#720, #746)

  • Fix JavaScript error when an output appears in nested uiOutputs. (Thanks, Gregory Zhang. #749)

  • Eliminate delay on receiving new value when updateSliderInput(value=...) is called.

  • Updated to DataTables (Javascript library) 1.10.5.

  • Fixed downloading of files that have no filename extension. (#575, #753)

  • Fixed bug where nested UI outputs broke outputs. (#749, #750)

  • Removed unneeded HTML ID attributes for checkboxGroupInputs and radioButtons. (#684)

  • Fixed bug where checkboxes were still active even after Shiny.unbindAll() was called. (#206)

  • The server side selectize input will load the first 1000 options by default before users start to type and search in the box. (#823)

  • renderDataTable() and dataTableOutput() have been deprecated in shiny and will be removed in future versions of shiny. Please use the DT package instead: http://rstudio.github.io/DT/ (#807)

  • Major client-side performance improvements for pages that have many conditionalPanels, tabPanels, and plotOutputs. (#693, #717, #723)

  • tabPanels now use the title for value by default. This fixes a bug in which an icon in the title caused problems with a conditionalPanel’s test condition. (#725, #728)

  • selectInput now has a size argument to control the height of the input box. (#729)

  • navbarPage no longer includes a first row of extra whitespace when header=NULL. (#722)

  • selectInputs now use Bootstrap styling when selectize=FALSE. (#724)

  • Better vertical spacing of label for checkbox groups and radio buttons.

  • selectInput correctly uses width for both selectize and non-selectize inputs. (#702)

  • The wrapper tag generated by htmlOutput and uiOutput can now be any type of HTML tag, instead of just span and div. Also, custom classes are now allowed on the tag. (#704)

  • Slider problems in IE 11 and Chrome on touchscreen-equipped Windows computers have been fixed. (#700)

  • Sliders now work correctly with draggable panels. (#711)

  • Fixed arguments in fixedPanel. (#709)

  • downloadHandler content callback functions are now invoked with a temp file name that has the same extension as the final filename that will be used by the download. This is to deal with the fact that some file writing functions in R will auto-append the extension for their file type (pdf, zip).

Shiny 0.11 switches away from the Bootstrap 2 web framework to the next version, Bootstrap 3. This is in part because Bootstrap 2 is no longer being developed, and in part because it allows us to tap into the ecosystem of Bootstrap 3 themes.

Known issues for migration

  • In Bootstrap 3, images in <img> tags are no longer automatically scaled to the width of their container. If you use img() in your UI code, or <img> tags in your raw HTML source, it’s possible that they will be too large in the new version of Shiny. To address this you can add the img-responsive class:
```r
img(src = "picture.png", class = "img-responsive")
```

The R code above will generate the following HTML:

```html
<img src="picture.png" class="img-responsive">
```
  • The sliders have been replaced. Previously, Shiny used the jslider library, but now it uses ion.RangeSlider. The new sliders have an updated appearance, and they have allowed us to fix many long-standing interface issues with the sliders.

  • The sliderInput() function no longer uses the format or locale options. Instead, you can use pre, post, and sep options to control the prefix, postfix, and thousands separator.

  • updateSliderInput() can now control the min, max, value, and step size of a slider. Previously, only the value could be controlled this way, and if you wanted to change other values, you needed to use Shiny’s dynamic UI.

  • If in your HTML you are using custom CSS classes that are specific to Bootstrap, you may need to update them for Bootstrap 3. See the Bootstrap migration guide.

If you encounter other migration issues, please let us know on the shiny-discuss mailing list, or on the Shiny issue tracker.

Using shinybootstrap2

If you would like to use Shiny 0.11 with Bootstrap 2, you can use the shinybootstrap2 package. Installation and usage instructions are on available on the project page. We recommend that you do this only as a temporary solution because future development on Shiny will use Bootstrap 3.

Installing an older version of Shiny

If you want to install a specific version of Shiny other than the latest CRAN release, you can use the install_version() function from devtools:


# Install devtools if you don't already have it:
install.package("devtools")

# Install the last version of Shiny prior to 0.11
devtools::install_version("shiny", "0.10.2.2")

Themes

Along with the release of Shiny 0.11, we’ve packaged up some Bootstrap 3 themes in the shinythemes package. This package makes it easy to use Bootstrap themes with Shiny.

Full Changelog

  • Changed sliders from jquery-slider to ion.rangeSlider. These sliders have an improved appearance, support updating more properties from the server, and can be controlled with keyboard input.

  • Switched from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 3. For most users, this will work seamlessly, but some users may need to use the shinybootstrap2 package for backward compatibility.

  • The UI of a Shiny app can now have a body tag. This is useful for CSS templates that use classes on the body tag.

  • actionButton and actionLink now pass their ... arguments to the underlying tag function. (#607)

  • Added observeEvent and eventReactive functions for clearer, more concise handling of actionButton, plot clicks, and other naturally-imperative inputs.

  • Errors that happen in reactives no longer prevent any remaining pending observers from executing. It is also now possible for users to control how errors are handled, with the ‘shiny.observer.error’ global option. (#603, #604)

  • Added an escape argument to renderDataTable() to escape the HTML entities in the data table for security reasons. This might break tables from previous versions of shiny that use raw HTML in the table content, and the old behavior can be brought back by escape = FALSE if you are aware of the security implications. (#627)

  • Changed the URI encoding/decoding functions internally to use encodeURI(), encodeURIComponent(), and decodeURIComponent() from the httpuv package instead of utils::URLencode() and utils::URLdecode(). (#630)

  • Shiny’s web assets are now minified.

  • The default reactive domain is now available in event handler functions. (#669)

  • Password input fields can now be used, with passwordInput(). (#672)

  • Remove use of rstudio::viewer in a code example, for R CMD check.
  • Changed some examples to use instead of .
  • The minimal version of R required for the shiny package is 3.0.0 now.

  • Shiny apps can now consist of a single file, app.R, instead of ui.R and server.R.

  • Upgraded DataTables from 1.9.4 to 1.10.2. This might be a breaking change if you have customized the DataTables options in your apps. (More info: https://github.com/rstudio/shiny/pull/558)

  • File uploading via fileInput() works for Internet Explorer 8 and 9 now. Note: IE8/9 do not support multiple files from a single file input. If you need to upload multiple files, you have to use one file input for each file.

  • Switched away from reference classes to R6.

  • Reactive log performance has been greatly improved.

  • Added Progress and withProgress, to display the progress of computation on the client browser.

  • Fixed #557: updateSelectizeInput(choices, server = TRUE) did not work when choices is a character vector.

  • Searching in DataTables is case-insensitive and the search strings are not treated as regular expressions by default now. If you want case-sensitive searching or regular expressions, you can use the configuration options search$caseInsensitive and search$regex, e.g. renderDataTable(..., options = list(search = list(caseInsensitve = FALSE, regex = TRUE))).

  • Added support for htmltools::htmlDependency’s new attachment parameter to renderUI/uiOutput.

  • Exported createWebDependency. It takes an htmltools::htmlDependency object and makes it available over Shiny’s built-in web server.

  • Custom output bindings can now render htmltools::htmlDependency objects at runtime using Shiny.renderDependencies().

  • Fixes to rounding behavior of sliderInput. (#301, #502)

  • Updated selectize.js to version 0.11.2. (#596)

  • Added position parameter to navbarPage.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: By default, observers now terminate themselves if they were created during a session and that session ends. See ?domains for more details.

  • Shiny can now be used in R Markdown v2 documents, to create “Shiny Docs”: reports and presentations that combine narrative, statically computed output, and fully dynamic inputs and outputs. For more info, including examples, see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_shiny.html.

  • The session object that can be passed into a server function (e.g. shinyServer(function(input, output, session) {…})) is now documented: see ?session.

  • Most inputs can now accept NULL label values to omit the label altogether.

  • New actionLink input control; like actionButton, but with the appearance of a normal link.

  • renderPlot now calls print on its result if it’s visible (i.e. no more explicit print() required for ggplot2).

  • Introduced Shiny app objects (see ?shinyApp). These essentially replace the little-advertised ability for runApp to take a list(ui=..., server=...) as the first argument instead of a directory (though that ability remains for backward compatibility). Unlike those lists, Shiny app objects are tagged with class shiny.appobj so they can be run simply by printing them.

  • Added maskReactiveContext function. It blocks the current reactive context, to evaluate expressions that shouldn’t use reactive sources directly. (This should not be commonly needed.)

  • Added flowLayout, splitLayout, and inputPanel functions for putting UI elements side by side. flowLayout lays out its children in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom arrangement. splitLayout evenly divides its horizontal space among its children (or unevenly divides if cellWidths argument is provided). inputPanel is like flowPanel, but with a light grey background, and is intended to be used to encapsulate small input controls wherever vertical space is at a premium.

  • Added serverInfo to obtain info about the Shiny Server if the app is served through it.

  • Added an inline argument (TRUE/FALSE) in checkboxGroupInput() and radioButtons() to allow the horizontal layout (inline = TRUE) of checkboxes or radio buttons. (Thanks, @saurfang, #481)

  • sliderInput and selectizeInput/selectInput now use a standard horizontal size instead of filling up all available horizontal space. Pass width="100%" explicitly for the old behavior.

  • Added the updateSelectizeInput() function to make it possible to process searching on the server side (i.e. using R), which can be much faster than the client side processing (i.e. using HTML and JavaScript). See the article at http://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/selectize.html for a detailed introduction.

  • Fixed a bug of renderDataTable() when the data object only has 1 row and 1 column. (Thanks, ZJ Dai, #429)

  • renderPrint gained a new argument ‘width’ to control the width of the text output, e.g. renderPrint({mtcars}, width = 40).

  • Fixed #220: the zip file for a directory created by some programs may not have the directory name as its first entry, in which case runUrl() can fail. (#220)

  • runGitHub() can also take a value of the form “username/repo” in its first argument, e.g. both runGitHub(“shiny_example”, “rstudio”) and runGitHub(“rstudio/shiny_example”) are valid ways to run the GitHub repo.

  • Fixed warning ‘Error in Context$new : could not find function “loadMethod”’ that was happening to dependent packages on “R CMD check”.
  • BREAKING CHANGE: Added a host parameter to runApp() and runExample(), which defaults to the shiny.host option if it is non-NULL, or “127.0.0.1” otherwise. This means that by default, Shiny applications can only be accessed on the same machine from which they are served. To allow other clients to connect, as in previous versions of Shiny, use “0.0.0.0” (or the IP address of one of your network interfaces, if you care to be explicit about it).

  • Added a new function selectizeInput() to use the JavaScript library selectize.js (https://github.com/brianreavis/selectize.js), which extends the basic select input in many aspects.

  • The selectInput() function also gained a new argument selectize = TRUE to makes use of selectize.js by default. If you want to revert back to the original select input, you have to call selectInput(…, selectize = FALSE).

  • Added Showcase mode, which displays the R code for an app right in the app itself. You can invoke Showcase mode by passing display.mode="showcase" to the runApp() function. Or, if an app is designed to run in Showcase mode by default, add a DESCRIPTION file in the app dir with Title, Author, and License fields; with “Type: Shiny”; and with “DisplayMode: Showcase”.

  • Upgraded to Bootstrap 2.3.2 and jQuery 1.11.0.

  • Make tags$head() and singleton() behave correctly when used with renderUI() and uiOutput(). Previously, “hoisting content to the head” and “only rendering items a single time” were features that worked only when the page was initially loading, not in dynamic rendering.

  • Files are now sourced with the keep.source option, to help with debugging and profiling.

  • Support user-defined input parsers for data coming in from JavaScript using the parseShinyInput method.

  • Fixed the bug #299: renderDataTable() can deal with 0-row data frames now. (reported by Harlan Harris)

  • Added navbarPage() and navbarMenu() functions to create applications with multiple top level panels.

  • Added navlistPanel() function to create layouts with a bootstrap navlist on the left and tabPanels on the right

  • Added type parameter to tabsetPanel() to enable the use of pill style tabs in addition to the standard ones.

  • Added position paramter to tabsetPanel() to enable positioning of tabs above, below, left, or right of tab content.

  • Added fluidPage() and fixedPage() functions as well as related row and column layout functions for creating arbitrary bootstrap grid layouts.

  • Added hr() builder function for creating horizontal rules.

  • Automatically concatenate duplicate attributes in tag definitions

  • Added responsive parameter to page building functions for opting-out of bootstrap responsive css.

  • Added theme parameter to page building functions for specifying alternate bootstrap css styles.

  • Added icon() function for embedding icons from the font awesome icon library

  • Added makeReactiveBinding function to turn a “regular” variable into a reactive one (i.e. reading the variable makes the current reactive context dependent on it, and setting the variable is a source of reactivity).

  • Added a function withMathJax() to include the MathJax library in an app.

  • The argument selected in checkboxGroupInput(), selectInput(), and radioButtons() refers to the value(s) instead of the name(s) of the argument choices now. For example, the value of the selected argument in selectInput(…, choices = c(‘Label 1’ = ‘x1’, ‘Label 2’ = ‘x2’), selected = ‘Label 2’) must be updated to ‘x2’, although names/labels will be automatically converted to values internally for backward compatibility. The same change applies to updateCheckboxGroupInput(), updateSelectInput(), and updateRadioButtons() as well. (#340)

  • Now it is possible to only update the value of a checkbox group, select input, or radio buttons using the selected argument without providing the choices argument in updateCheckboxGroupInput(), updateSelectInput(), and updateRadioButtons(), respectively. (#340)

  • Added absolutePanel and fixedPanel functions for creating absolute- and fixed-position panels. They can be easily made user-draggable by specifying draggable = TRUE.

  • For the options argument of the function renderDataTable(), we can pass literal JavaScript code to the DataTables library via I(). This makes it possible to use any JavaScript object in the options, e.g. a JavaScript function (which is not supported in JSON). See ?renderDataTable for details and examples.

  • DataTables also works under IE8 now.

  • Fixed a bug in DataTables pagination when searching is turned on, which caused failures for matrices as well as empty rows when displaying data frames using renderDataTable().

  • The options argument in renderDataTable() can also take a function that returns a list. This makes it possible to use reactive values in the options. (#392)

  • renderDataTable() respects more DataTables options now: (1) either bPaginate = FALSE or iDisplayLength = -1 will disable pagination (i.e. all rows are returned from the data); besides, this means we can also use -1 in the length menu, e.g. aLengthMenu = list(c(10, 30, -1), list(10, 30, ‘All’)); (2) we can disable searching for individual columns through the bSearchable option, e.g. aoColumns = list(list(bSearchable = FALSE), list(bSearchable = TRUE),…) (the search box for the first column is hidden); (3) we can turn off searching entirely (for both global searching and individual columns) using the option bFilter = FALSE.

  • Added an argument callback in renderDataTable() so that a custom JavaScript function can be applied to the DataTable object. This makes it much easier to use DataTables plug-ins.

  • For numeric columns in a DataTable, the search boxes support lower and upper bounds now: a search query of the form “lower,upper” (without quotes) indicates the limits [lower, upper]. For a column X, this means the rows corresponding to X >= lower & X <= upper are returned. If we omit either the lower limit or the upper limit, only the other limit will be used, e.g. “,upper” means X <= upper.

  • updateNumericInput(value) tries to preserve numeric precision by avoiding scientific notation when possible, e.g. 102145 is no longer rounded to 1.0214e+05 = 102140. (Thanks, Martin Loos. #401)

  • sliderInput() no longer treats a label wrapped in HTML() as plain text, e.g. the label in sliderInput(…, label = HTML(‘A Label’)) will not be escaped any more. (#119)

  • Fixed #306: the trailing slash in a path could fail addResourcePath() under Windows. (Thanks, ZJ Dai)

  • Dots are now legal characters for inputId/outputId. (Thanks, Kevin Lindquist. #358)

  • Debug hooks are registered on all user-provided functions and (reactive) expressions (e.g., in renderPlot()), which makes it possible to set breakpoints in these functions using the latest version of the RStudio IDE, and the RStudio visual debugging tools can be used to debug Shiny apps. Internally, the registration is done via installExprFunction(), which is a new function introduced in this version to replace exprToFunction() so that the registration can be automatically done.

  • Added a new function renderDataTable() to display tables using the JavaScript library DataTables. It includes basic features like pagination, searching (global search or search by individual columns), sorting (by single or multiple columns). All these features are implemented on the R side; for example, we can use R regular expressions for searching. Besides, it also uses the Bootstrap CSS style. See the full documentation and examples in the tutorial: http://rstudio.github.io/shiny/tutorial/#datatables

  • Added a new option shiny.error which can take a function as an error handler. It is called when an error occurs in an app (in user-provided code), e.g., after we set options(shiny.error = recover), we can enter a specified environment in the call stack to debug our code after an error occurs.

  • The argument launch.browser in runApp() can also be a function, which takes the URL of the shiny app as its input value.

  • runApp() uses a random port between 3000 and 8000 instead of 8100 now. It will try up to 20 ports in case certain ports are not available.

  • Fixed a bug for conditional panels: the value input.id in the condition was not correctly retrieved when the input widget had a type, such as numericInput(). (reported by Jason Bryer)

  • Fixed two bugs in plotOutput(); clickId and hoverId did not give correct coordinates in Firefox, or when the axis limits of the plot were changed. (reported by Chris Warth and Greg D)

  • The minimal required version for the httpuv package was increased to 1.2 (on CRAN now).

  • Stopped sending websocket subprotocol. This fixes a compatibility issue with Google Chrome 30.

  • The input and output objects are now also accessible via session$input and session$output.

  • Added click and hover events for static plots; see ?plotOutput for details.

  • Added optional logging of the execution states of a reactive program, and tools for visualizing the log data. To use, start a new R session and call options(shiny.reactlog=TRUE). Then launch a Shiny app and interact with it. Press Ctrl+F3 (or for Mac, Cmd+F3) in the browser to launch an interactive visualization of the reactivity that has occurred. See ?showReactLog for more information.

  • Added includeScript() and includeCSS() functions.

  • Reactive expressions now have class=“reactive” attribute. Also added is.reactive() and is.reactivevalues() functions.

  • New stopApp() function, which stops an app and returns a value to the caller of runApp().

  • Added the shiny.usecairo option, which can be used to tell Shiny not to use Cairo for PNG output even when it is installed. (Defaults to TRUE.)

  • Speed increases for selectInput() and radioButtons(), and their corresponding updater functions, for when they have many options.

  • Added tagSetChildren() and tagAppendChildren() functions.

  • The HTTP request object that created the websocket is now accessible from the session object, as session$request. This is a Rook-like request environment that can be used to access HTTP headers, among other things. (Note: When running in a Shiny Server environment, the request will reflect the proxy HTTP request that was made from the Shiny Server process to the R process, not the request that was made from the web browser to Shiny Server.)

  • Fix getComputedStyle issue, for IE8 browser compatibility (#196). Note: Shiny Server is still required for IE8/9 compatibility.

  • Add shiny.sharedSecret option, to require the HTTP header Shiny-Shared-Secret to be set to the given value.

  • tabsetPanel() can be directed to start with a specific tab selected.

  • Fix bug where multiple file uploads with 3 or more files result in incorrect data.

  • Add withTags() function.

  • Add dateInput and dateRangeInput.

  • shinyServer() now takes an optional session argument, which is used for communication with the session object.

  • Add functions to update values of existing inputs on a page, instead of replacing them entirely.

  • Allow listening on domain sockets.

  • Added actionButton() to Shiny.

  • The server can now send custom JSON messages to the client. On the client side, functions can be registered to handle these messages.

  • Callbacks can be registered to be called at the end of a client session.

  • Add ability to set priority of observers and outputs. Each priority level gets its own queue.

  • Fix bug where the presence of a submit button would prevent sending of metadata until the button was clicked.

  • reactiveTimer() and invalidateLater() by default no longer invalidate reactive objects after the client session has closed.

  • Shiny apps can be run without a server.r and ui.r file.

  • Switch from websockets package for handling websocket connections to httpuv.

  • New method for detecting hidden output objects. Instead of checking that height and width are 0, it checks that the object or any ancestor in the DOM has style display:none.

  • Add clientData reactive values object, which carries information about the client. This includes the hidden status of output objects, height/width plot output objects, and the URL of the browser.

  • Add parseQueryString() function.

  • Add renderImage() function for sending arbitrary image files to the client, and its counterpart, imageOutput().

  • Add support for high-resolution (Retina) displays.

  • Fix bug #55, where renderTable() would throw error with an empty data frame.

  • Fix bug where width and height weren’t passed along properly from reactivePlot to renderPlot.

  • Fix bug where infinite recursion would happen when reactivePlot was passed a function for width or height.

  • Added suspend/resume capability to observers.

  • Output objects are automatically suspended when they are hidden on the user’s web browser.

  • runGist() accepts GitHub’s new URL format, which includes the username.

  • reactive() and observe() now take expressions instead of functions.

  • reactiveText(), reactivePlot(), and so on, have been renamed to renderText(), renderPlot(), etc. They also now take expressions instead of functions.

  • Fixed a bug where empty values in a numericInput were sent to the R process as 0. They are now sent as NA.

  • Fix issue #91: bug where downloading files did not work.

  • Add [[<- operator for shinyoutput object, making it possible to assign values with output[['plot1']] <- ....

  • Reactive functions now preserve the visible/invisible state of their returned values.

  • Reactive functions are now evaluated lazily.

  • Add reactiveValues().

  • Using as.list() to convert a reactivevalues object (like input) to a list is deprecated. The new function reactiveValuesToList() should be used instead.

  • Add isolate(). This function is used for accessing reactive functions, without them invalidating their parent contexts.

  • Fix issue #58: bug where reactive functions are not re-run when all items in a checkboxGroup are unchecked.

  • Fix issue #71, where reactiveTable() would return blank if the first element of a data frame was NA.

  • In plotOutput, better validation for CSS units when specifying width and height.

  • reactivePrint() no longer displays invisible output.

  • reactiveText() no longer displays printed output, only the return value from a function.

  • The runGitHub() and runUrl() functions have been added, for running Shiny apps from GitHub repositories and zip/tar files at remote URLs.

  • Fix issue #64, where pressing Enter in a textbox would cause a form to submit.

  • runGist has been updated to use the new download URLs from https://gist.github.com.

  • Shiny now uses CairoPNG() for output, when the Cairo package is available. This provides better-looking output on Linux and Windows.

  • Ignore request variables for routing purposes
  • Fix CRAN warning (assigning to global environment)
  • [BREAKING] Modify API of downloadHandler: The content function now takes a file path, not writable connection, as an argument. This makes it much easier to work with APIs that only write to file paths, not connections.
  • Fix subtle name resolution bug–the usual symptom being S4 methods not being invoked correctly when called from inside of ui.R or server.R
  • Fix slider animator, which broke in 0.1.10
  • Fix temp file leak in reactivePlot
  • Fix problems with runGist on Windows

  • Add feature for on-the-fly file downloads (e.g. CSV data, PDFs)

  • Add CSS hooks for app-wide busy indicators

  • Fix input binding with IE8 on Shiny Server

  • Fix issue #41: reactiveTable should allow print options too

  • Allow dynamic sizing of reactivePlot (i.e. using a function instead of a fixed value)

  • Support more MIME types when serving out of www

  • Fix issue #35: Allow modification of untar args

  • headerPanel can take an explicit window title parameter

  • checkboxInput uses correct attribute checked instead of selected

  • Fix plot rendering with IE8 on Shiny Server

  • Much less flicker when updating plots

  • More customizable error display

  • Add includeText, includeHTML, and includeMarkdown functions for putting text, HTML, and Markdown content from external files in the application’s UI.

  • Add runGist function for conveniently running a Shiny app that is published on gist.github.com.

  • Fix issue #27: Warnings cause reactive functions to stop executing.

  • The server.R and ui.R filenames are now case insensitive.

  • Add wellPanel function for creating inset areas on the page.

  • Add bootstrapPage function for creating new Bootstrap based layouts from scratch.

  • Fix issue #26: Shiny.OutputBindings not correctly exported.

  • Add repeatable function for making easily repeatable versions of random number generating functions.

  • Transcode JSON into UTF-8 (prevents non-ASCII reactivePrint values from causing errors on Windows).

  • Import package dependencies, instead of attaching them (with the exception of websockets, which doesn’t currently work unless attached).

  • conditionalPanel was animated, now it is not.

  • bindAll was not correctly sending initial values to the server; fixed.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: JS APIs Shiny.bindInput and Shiny.bindOutput removed and replaced with Shiny.bindAll; Shiny.unbindInput and Shiny.unbindOutput removed and replaced with Shiny.unbindAll.

  • Add file upload support (currently only works with Chrome and Firefox). Use a normal HTML file input, or call the fileInput UI function.

  • Shiny.unbindOutputs did not work, now it does.

  • Generally improved robustness of dynamic input/output bindings.

  • Add conditionalPanel UI function to allow showing/hiding UI based on a JS expression; for example, whether an input is a particular value. Also works in raw HTML (add the data-display-if attribute to the element that should be shown/hidden).

  • htmlOutput (CSS class shiny-html-output) can contain inputs and outputs.

  • Allow Bootstrap tabsets to act as reactive inputs; their value indicates which tab is active

  • Upgrade to Bootstrap 2.1

  • Add checkboxGroupInput control, which presents a list of checkboxes and returns a vector of the selected values

  • Add addResourcePath, intended for reusable component authors to access CSS, JavaScript, image files, etc. from their package directories

  • Add Shiny.bindInputs(scope), .unbindInputs(scope), .bindOutputs(scope), and .unbindOutputs(scope) JS API calls to allow dynamic binding/unbinding of HTML elements

  • Introduce Shiny.inputBindings.register JS API and InputBinding class, for creating custom input controls

  • Add step parameter to numericInput

  • Read names of input using names(input)

  • Access snapshot of input as a list using as.list(input)

  • Fix issue #10: Plots in tabsets not rendered

  • Initial private beta release!