Displaying interactive tiles in Shiny UI?

[ulfelder]

Is there a way to render interactive tiles in a Shiny UI?

I have an app that's meant to recommend databases to users, based on criteria they specify through input widgets. On the back end, I've got a table in which each database gets a row, so the recommendations are just the result of a filtering process.

The simple way to display the results is in a table, but that feels kind of boring. What I'd like to do instead is to populate the mainPanel with labeled boxes that a user can click on or hover over to get more information (i.e., what would be displayed in each row in a tabular version).

Is this is a thing in Shiny? Maybe some kind of hot-rodded version of a valueBox? Or is this the point where Shiny conks out and you need to jump to something like javascript to get it done?

[nirgrahamuk]

you can create dynamic UI in shiny, there are tutorials on different approaches, experience tells me uiOutput/renderUI is generally the best. Such an approach can allow you to dynamically create valueBoxes based on your filter results etc.

[ulfelder]

Thanks, @nirgrahamuk, I should have been clearer: I understand how to make a dynamic UI. The part I can't see a way to do now is to render a set of tiles with tooltips that appear when the user hovers over one of them, or to have a label or popup appear when they click on one. So, basically, the functionality you can get with markers in a Leaflet map, but with tiles rendered in the main panel. With valueBox, I gather you can associate a url with the box so the user can click through to a web page, but here I want the click to render something in the UI, not to take the user away from it. Maybe I'm missing something?

[nirgrahamuk]

shinyBS package has a popify function. I'd start there

[ulfelder]

@nirgrahamuk, that looks like a great lead, thank you. I can probably use one of these functions to add a tooltip or popover to a valueBox. I'll report back after I've tried it and will mark this as the solution if it works the way I think it will.

[ulfelder]

I haven't yet succeeded in putting all the parts together the way I like, but the functions in the shinyBS package recommended by @nirgrahamuk offer an elegant way to add tooltips and popovers to a UI, so I'm marking that as a solution to my core problem. Now to figure out how to produce lists of UI elements and associated popovers for the database rows returned by the user's selections...