Shiny - populate static HTML table with filtered data based on input

Question

I am currently working on a Shiny app which displays a static HTML table, sourced from another file, because of the size of the HTML code. The table is initialized with an empty

Answer 1

I found a solution to my problem!

The static html table is wraped in a function, which will be sourced once on startup in the server part of the app and then called in the renderUI() function. The render-function will be triggered every time a user changes the menu. Here I filter the dataframe regarding to the input and pass it to the "build_table" function. Each cell of the table is then populated with the needed values from the dataframe via indexes. The function return the full html table back to the renderUI().

This is the toy example from above, adjusted to the working solution:

app.R

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(

  fluidRow(
           column(width = 6, uiOutput("cars"))
  ),
  fluidRow(
    column(width = 6, htmlOutput("html.table"))
  )
)

server <- function(input, output) {

  source("server_html_table.R",  local = TRUE)

  output$cars <- renderUI({
    selectizeInput(
      inputId = "cars",
      label = NULL,
      choices = rownames(mtcars),
      options = list(placeholder = 'Cars')
    )
  })

  output$html.table <- renderUI({

    input$cars

    isolate({

      filtered_cars <- subset(mtcars, rownames(mtcars) %in% input$cars)

      build_table(filtered_cars)
    })
  })
}

# Run the application 
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

server_html_table.R

build_table <- function(data){

  html.table <- tags$table(style = "border: 1px solid black; padding: 1%; width: 100%;",
                          tags$tr(
                                  tags$th("Car Name"),
                                  tags$th("MPG"),
                                  tags$th("CYL"),
                                  tags$th("DISP"),
                                  tags$th("HP")

                          ),
                          tags$tr(
                                  tags$td(rownames(data)),
                                  tags$td(data$mpg),
                                  tags$td(data$cyl),
                                  tags$td(data$disp),
                                  tags$td(data$hp)
                         )
                  )

  return(html.table)
}