When is getState used in Shiny input bindings?

[mdlama]

When is getState used in Shiny input bindings? My assumption is it needs to be included in a custom input if the input is to be bookmarked, but I'm not sure as I can't find anything that discusses this. Thanks for your help!

• Drew

[mdlama]

For context, in the article How to create custom input bindings, it states under Additional methods:

In addition to the previously discussed methods, several other JavaScript methods can be added to your input binding object, notably; getId, getState, getRatePolicy, receiveMessage and unsubscribe. These are discussed in the various references provided and are not further discussed here.

The custom input bindings example from the Shiny gallery has this method - see below (truncated for brevity):

var urlInputBinding = new Shiny.InputBinding();
$.extend(urlInputBinding, {
   ...
   // This returns a full description of the input state.
   // Note that some inputs may be too complex for a full description of the
   // state to be feasible.
   getState: function(el) {
     return {
       label: $(el).parent().find('label[for="' + $escape(el.id) + '"]').text(),
       value: el.value
     };
  }
  ...
}

I did a thorough (I think) search of the Shiny codebase and only saw getState when the input is being created, so I'm thinking now it might just be for testing/debugging purposes and not required for bookmarking state?

[winston]

Excellent question! The getState() method was added in this pull request with the purpose of using it for testing Shiny's JavaScript code. https://github.com/rstudio/shiny/pull/139

However, that test system is no longer used by Shiny, and I don't think getState() is used anywhere now.

[mdlama]

Awesome, thanks for the clarification, Winston!