How to build a front end to an existing public shinyapps

shiny
#1

Hi, my local government has a public database using shinyapps.io. It is very simple, and can be downloaded as just a few csv files.

I am wondering if there is a way to build a private "front end" to the existing database that would allow us to add a few columns to each of the pages (what can be downloaded as a csv file). That way when the local government updates its database, those updates would be reflected in our database immediately.

I haven't worked in shinyapps before, but have worked with a variety of database structures and large excel workbooks.

#2

You can't just take an application published on shinyapps.io (I want to emphasize that is an application and not a database) and made changes, you would need access to the source code for that.

Maybe you could scrape the application regularly and use that to update your own application or database but that would require a completely different approach and it wouldn't involve the use of shiny on your part.

#3

I'm still hoping someone might have a suggestion here. Just to be clear, I understand that it is not possible to make changes to someone else's application (or database). I was wondering if there is a way to feed the data in real-time or via a scheduled (daily?) scrape into a similarly constructed application (or database) and then augment it with a few more columns. I haven't worked with APIs or anything like that, but I have augmented a sql table on a server with additional tables in MS Access, so I am hoping for something similar.

#4

Yes, it is possible, as I said before, you can scrape it using something like rvest and schedule the execution of the code using a cron job to get the updated data, but nothing of that is related to shiny so you might want to open a new topic for that.

#5

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