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?
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.
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, 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.
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...