Using shiny app's webserver to serve data files for my widget's javascript code?

shiny
1

Two shiny widgets I work on benefit from being able to load data files in javascript. The nice capabilities of customMessageHandlers don't always work for this. (For instance, igv.js, the integrative genomics viewer, displays a genome track from a web-served url. Sometimes we create those tracks on the fly, save them locally from app.R, then send a message to our widget's javascript, and ask igv to display the url.

In related projects where I usehttpuv but not shiny, I find that this works reliably:

var dataURI = window.location.href + "?" + bedFileName;

creates a URI which can be used in Javascript. The requested file is returned by httpuv's simple built-in web server. When I try this with shiny, dataURI redirects to return the app itself, lopping off the "?" and the appended filename.

Any advice? Can I use the built-in webserver to serve up local files to my widget javascript?

Thank you,

  • Paul
2

The answer turned out to be simple:

addResourcePath("tracks", "tracks")

enables http GET via the shiny webserver, to window.location.href + "/tracks/" + filename.

3

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