Shiny app-show some message while user is waiting for output

shiny
1

Hi everyone, is it possible to allow shiny to show some messages while user are waiting for the result of the computation? For example, for a function that would take a long time, a user would see this, which is something gray. However, I want to user to know more about what is going on, such as showing "Computing XXX", like what we would see on a well designed web app. I know an error or a warning would be shown on the screen, but is there any other way besides them?
image
It would be even better if some loading anime can be shown.

2

The following displays a spinning orange cog when shiny tells the browser that it is busy. Feel free to customize it as needed and replace fa fa-spinner fa-pulse fa-fw with any other font awesome animation https://fontawesome.com/how-to-use/on-the-web/styling/animating-icons

shiny_busy <- function() {
  # use &nbsp; for some alignment, if needed
  HTML("&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;", paste0(
    '<span data-display-if="',
    '$(&#39;html&#39;).attr(&#39;class&#39;)==&#39;shiny-busy&#39;',
    '">',
    '<i class="fa fa-spinner fa-pulse fa-fw" style="color:orange"></i>',
    '</span>'
  ))
}

# call from shiny ui with
shiny_busy()
2 Likes
3

Thank you Mike! I am not very familiar with CSS but is there a way to adjust the size of the spinner?

4

Change style to something like style="color:orange; font-size:30px"

5

@trcc , I can't tell for sure, but also look into https://shiny.rstudio.com/reference/shiny/latest/freezeReactiveValue.html to remove the temporary state of 'argument is not a matrix'.