Add Loading Animations to a 'shiny' Output While It's Recalculating.

shinycssloaders

⌛ Add loading animations to a Shiny output while it's recalculating

When a Shiny output (such as a plot, table, map, etc.) is recalculating, it remains visible but gets greyed out. Using {shinycssloaders}, you can add a loading animation ("spinner") to outputs instead of greying them out. By wrapping a Shiny output in withSpinner(), a spinner will automatically appear while the output is recalculating. You can also manually trigger a spinner using showSpinner().

In addition to showing spinners on outputs, you can also use showPageSpinner() to show a full-page spinner that covers the entire page.

You can choose from one of 8 built-in animation types, and customize the colour/size. You can also use your own image instead of the built-in animations. See the demo Shiny app online for examples.

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This package is part of a larger ecosystem of packages with a shared vision: solving common Shiny issues and improving Shiny apps with minimal effort, minimal code changes, and clear documentation. Other packages for your Shiny apps:

Table of contents

• Example
• How to use
• Installation
• Features
• Sponsors 🏆

Example

For interactive examples and to see some of the features, check out the demo app.

Below is a simple example of what {shinycssloaders} looks like:

How to use

Simply wrap a Shiny output in a call to withSpinner(). If you have %>% loaded, you can use it, for example plotOutput("myplot") %>% withSpinner().

Basic usage:

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(
    actionButton("go", "Go"),
    shinycssloaders::withSpinner(
        plotOutput("plot")
    )
)
server <- function(input, output) {
    output$plot <- renderPlot({
        input$go
        Sys.sleep(1.5)
        plot(runif(10))
    })
}
shinyApp(ui, server)

Using a full-page spinner:

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(
    actionButton("go", "Go"),
    plotOutput("plot")
)
server <- function(input, output) {
    observeEvent(input$go, {
      showPageSpinner()
      Sys.sleep(1)
      hidePageSpinner()
    })
    output$plot <- renderPlot({
        plot(runif(10))
    })
}
shinyApp(ui, server)

You can also use {shinycssloaders} in Rmarkdown documents, as long as they use runtime: shiny.

Installation

For most users: To install the stable CRAN version:

install.packages("shinycssloaders")

For advanced users: To install the latest development version from GitHub:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("daattali/shinycssloaders")

Features

8 customizable built-in spinners

You can use the type parameter to choose one of the 8 built-in animations, the color parameter to change the spinner's colour, and size to make the spinner smaller or larger (2 will make the spinner twice as large). For example, withSpinner(plotOutput("myplot"), type = 5, color = "#0dc5c1", size = 2).

Using a custom image

If you don't want to use any of the built-in spinners, you can also provide your own image (either a still image or a GIF) to use instead, using the image parameter.

Specifying the spinner height

The spinner attempts to automatically figure out the height of the output it replaces, and to vertically center itself. For some outputs (such as tables), the height is unknown, so the spinner will assume the output is 400px tall. If your output is expected to be significantly smaller or larger, you can use the proxy.height parameter to adjust this.

Manually triggering the spinner

Any Shiny output that uses withSpinner() will automatically show a spinner while it's recalculating. You can also manually show/hide an output's spinner using showSpinner()/hideSpinner().

Full-page spinner

You can also use showPageSpinner() to show a full-page spinner that will cover the entire page rather than a single Shiny output. Full page spinners support the same parameters as regular spinners, and can be removed with hidePageSpinner().

Add a message

Use the caption parameter to add a custom message under the spinner. The message can either be plain text ("Please wait") or HTML (div(strong("Loading"), br(), em("Please wait"))).

Setting spinner parameters globally

If you want all the spinners in your app to share some of the options, instead of specifying them in each call to withSpinner(), you can set them globally using R options. For example, if you want all spinners to be of a certain type and color, you can set options(spinner.type = 5, spinner.color = "#0dc5c1"). Similarly, for full-page spinners you can use page.spinner.type, page.spinner.color, etc to set default parameters instead of setting them in showPageSpinner().

Showing a spinner on top of the output

By default, the out-dated output gets hidden while the spinner is showing. You can change this behaviour to have the spinner appear on top of the old output using the hide.ui = FALSE parameter.

Sponsors 🏆

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{shinycssloaders} is the result of many days of work, including many more to come. Show your support and become the first sponsor for {shinycssloaders}!

Credits

The 8 built-in animations are taken from https://projects.lukehaas.me/css-loaders/.

The package was originally created by Andrew Sali.