Select from Plotly outputs in selectInput?

I'm trying to create an app with three drop down menus, one where the indicator is selected and two with cities/states so that you can compare the same indicator across two different geographies. For my purposes, it seems like the easiest thing to do is create a plot and then have the choices in selectInput be a list of the plots I've created. Is this possible? If not, what is the best way to accomplish this?

This is basically what I want it to look like, I just haven't figured out how to connect the plots to both drop downs. I'm pretty new to Shiny and have only worked on apps that other people have started (though this is sort of based on another app), so please let me know if there's any other helpful information I can provide.

Thanks!

My normal approach to this sort of problem would be to use the inputs to filter the data prior to creating the graphics. That way you can avoid having to do filtering in the plot_ly or ggplotly function calls. It would typically look like this inside of my server function:

filtered_data <- reactive({
  raw_data %>%
    filter(indicator == input$indicator,
            city %in% c(input$first_city, input$second_city))
})

If you want a more detailed answer it would help to post a minimal example of your app code so that we can better help you.

I'd also encourage you to use two separate reactive() functions to create two data sets so that you can generate two plots. Then you can use the UI controls to place them on the page next to each other. This helps to keep each aspect of your server-side code tightly defined and gives you the ability to use each data subset individually for other purposes on screen.

Some of the plotly stuff needs to be cleaned up, though that really doesn't matter here. I already have an app that's similar to this, but only has one geography. Ideally I'll have 10 in total, which means 10 datasets. I was thinking it would be easier to create a dataset for each indicator rather than each geography, since I won't be using all the indicators from all the datasets. This code only has one indicator, so if what I'm trying to do is possible, there would be a plot for each indicator. I really hope this is making sense!

UI:

shinyUI(fluidPage(
  tags$head(tags$style(
    HTML('header {background: #089AD1; min-width: 550px;}
          h1 {min-width: 550px !important;}
          h3 {min-width: 500px !important;}
          #sidebar {min-width: 550px !important;}
          #mainpanel {min-width: 550px !important;}
          #groupbars {min-width: 550px !important;}
         '))),

                    sidebarLayout(
                      sidebarPanel(id = "sidebar",
                                   h3(),
                        selectInput("var", label = "Select an Indicator:",
                                    choices = list("Demographics" = c("Housing Status", "Sex", "Race", "Sexual Orientation"))),
                        selectInput("geo", label = "Select First Geography:",
                                    choices = list("Cities" = c("", "New York City"),
                                                   "States" = c("Connecticut", "Maryland")), selected = "New York City"),
                        selectInput("geo2", label = "Select Second Geography:",
                                    choices = list("Cities" = c("", "New York City"),
                                                   "States" = c("Connecticut", "Maryland")), selected = "Connecticut"),
                        width = 12),
              mainPanel(id = "mainpanel",
                  fluidRow(h3("blah blah blah"), align = "center",
                      column(6, align = "center",
                             plotlyOutput("hmlpie1")),
                      column(6, align = "center",
                             plotlyOutput("hmlpie2"))),

                  fluidRow(
                    column(12,
                        h4("Data Table"),
                        tableOutput("table"),
                        downloadButton("DownloadPieData", "Download Table"),
                        br(), br(),
                        h3("Outcomes by Type of Homelessness"),
                        br(), br(),
                        plotlyOutput("groupbars", height = 500),
                        br(),
                        h4("Data Table"),
                        tableOutput("bartable"),
                        downloadButton("DownloadBarData", "Download Table"),
           br(), br())),
           width = 12)
))
)

Server:

shinyServer(
  function(input, output) {
    output$image1 <- renderImage({
      list(src = "www/image1.png",
           contentType = "image/png"
      )
    }, deleteFile = FALSE)
    output$hmlpie1 <- renderPlotly({
      data <- switch(input$geo,
                      "New York City" = hml[hml$Geography=="NYC", ], "Connecticut" = hml[hml$Geography=="CT", ], 
                      "Maryland" = hml[hml$Geography=="MD", ])
      plot_ly(data, labels = ~HousingStatus, values = ~Value,
              type = "pie", hole = 0.4, textinfo = "label+percent", hoverinfo = "label+percent", insidetextfont = list(color = "#FFFFFF"),
              marker = list(colors = c("#FED90B", "#EA361C", "#ACDEFA", "#0A56A2")),
              showlegend = F, sort = F) %>%
        layout(margin = list(l = 40, r = 40), title = FALSE,
               xaxis = list(showgrid = FALSE, zeroline = FALSE, showticklabels = FALSE),
               yaxis = list(showgrid = FALSE, zeroline = FALSE, showticklabels = FALSE),
               autosize = F, width = 370, height = 430) %>%
        add_annotations(text = paste(input$var), showarrow = F, x = 0.5, y = 1.07, xref = "paper", yref = "paper",
                        font = list(size = 18))
    })


      output$hmlpie2 <- renderPlotly({
        data <- switch(input$geo2,
                       "New York City" = hml[hml$Geography=="NYC", ], "Connecticut" = hml[hml$Geography=="CT", ], 
                       "Maryland" = hml[hml$Geography=="MD", ])
        plot_ly(data, labels = ~HousingStatus, values = ~Value,
                type = "pie", hole = 0.4, textinfo = "label+percent", hoverinfo = "label+percent", insidetextfont = list(color = "#FFFFFF"),
                marker = list(colors = c("#FED90B", "#EA361C", "#ACDEFA", "#0A56A2")),
                showlegend = F, sort = F) %>%
          layout(margin = list(l = 40, r = 40), title = FALSE,
                 xaxis = list(showgrid = FALSE, zeroline = FALSE, showticklabels = FALSE),
                 yaxis = list(showgrid = FALSE, zeroline = FALSE, showticklabels = FALSE),
                 autosize = F, width = 370, height = 430) %>%
          add_annotations(text = paste(input$var), showarrow = F, x = 0.5, y = 1.07, xref = "paper", yref = "paper",
                          font = list(size = 18))
    
    
    })
  })

Also, very open to not creating a plot for each indicator, but I'm not sure if it's possible to create a plot with two inputs (geography and indicator) and what that dataset would look like. The raw data needs so much reformatting and I've already done a lot of these calculations so it seems much easier to create a new dataset(s).