Bookmarking and saving the bookmarks in R shiny

Question

I am trying to use the bookmark in R shiny app and the save the bookmarks in a table. First stage I want to save them locally and retrieve them whenever I load this application. Then save them on a database. Here is the code for bookmarking and saving it on the table. The bookmarking as of now works where it does read from the saved RDS.

Also does bookmarking with URL work on shinyapps.io which can save the bookmarks to a database residing on AWS.

library(shiny)
library(RSQLite)
library(data.table)

ui <- function(request) {
  fluidPage(
    plotOutput("plot"),
    sliderInput("n", "Number of observations", 1, nrow(faithful), 100),
    fluidRow(column(2, textInput(inputId = "description", label = "Bookmark description", placeholder = "Data Summary")), column(2, bookmarkButton(id="bookmarkBtn"))),
    DT::dataTableOutput("urlTable", width = "100%"),
    tags$style(type='text/css', "#bookmarkBtn { width:100%; margin-top: 25px;}")
  )
}

server <- function(input, output, session) {

  # con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), "bookmarks.db", overwrite = FALSE)
   myBookmarks <- reactiveValues(urlDF = NULL)
  #
  observeEvent(input$bookmarkBtn, {
    session$doBookmark()
  })
  #
  # if(dbExistsTable(con, "Bookmarks")){
  #   tmpUrlDF <- data.table(dbReadTable(con, "Bookmarks"))
  #   myBookmarks$urlDF <- tmpUrlDF[, Timestamp := as.POSIXct(Timestamp, origin="1970-01-01 00:00")]
  # } else {
  #   myBookmarks$urlDF <- NULL
  # }
  #
  # session$onSessionEnded(function() {
  #   tmpUrlDF <- isolate({myBookmarks$urlDF})
  #   if(!is.null(tmpUrlDF)){
  #     dbWriteTable(con, "Bookmarks", tmpUrlDF, overwrite = TRUE)
  #   }
  #   dbDisconnect(con)
  # })

  setBookmarkExclude(c("bookmarkBtn", "description", "urlTable_cell_clicked", "urlTable_rows_all", "urlTable_rows_current", "urlTable_rows_selected", "urlTable_search", "urlTable_state", "urlTable_row_last_clicked"))

  output$plot <- renderPlot({
    hist(faithful$eruptions[seq_len(input$n)], breaks = 40)
  })

  onBookmarked(fun=function(url){
    if(!url %in% myBookmarks$urlDF){
      if(is.null(myBookmarks$urlDF)){
        myBookmarks$urlDF <- unique(data.table(Description = input$description, URL = paste0("<a href='", url, "'>", url,"</a>"), Timestamp = Sys.time(), Session = session$token), by="URL")
      } else {
        myBookmarks$urlDF <- unique(rbindlist(list(myBookmarks$urlDF, data.table(Description = input$description, URL = paste0("<a href='", url, "'>", url,"</a>"), Timestamp = Sys.time(), Session = session$token))), by="URL")
      }
    }
  })

  output$urlTable = DT::renderDataTable({
    #read_rds("bookmarks.rds")
    myBookmarks$urlDF
    write_rds(myBookmarks$urlDF, "bookmark.rds")
  }, escape=FALSE)

}

enableBookmarking(store = "url")
shinyApp(ui, server)
#> PhantomJS not found. You can install it with webshot::install_phantomjs(). If it is installed, please make sure the phantomjs executable can be found via the PATH variable.

Shiny applications not supported in static R Markdown documents

^{Created on 2019-01-29 by the reprex package (v0.2.1.9000)}

ismirsehregal · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-01T10:54:27.347

Here is an alternative approach to my earlier answer using saveRDS() instead of sqlite:

Edit: Added username check.

library(shiny)
# library(RSQLite)
library(data.table)

ui <- function(request) {
  fluidPage(
    plotOutput("plot"),
    sliderInput("n", "Number of observations", 1, nrow(faithful), 100),
    fluidRow(column(2, textInput(inputId = "description", label = "Bookmark description", placeholder = "Data Summary")), column(2, bookmarkButton(id="bookmarkBtn"))),
    DT::dataTableOutput("urlTable", width = "100%"),
    tags$style(type='text/css', "#bookmarkBtn { width:100%; margin-top: 25px;}")
  )
}

server <- function(input, output, session) {

  # con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), "bookmarks.db", overwrite = FALSE)
  myBookmarks <- reactiveValues(urlDF = NULL)

  observeEvent(input$bookmarkBtn, {
    session$doBookmark()
  })

  # if(dbExistsTable(con, "Bookmarks")){
  #   tmpUrlDF <- data.table(dbReadTable(con, "Bookmarks"))
  #   myBookmarks$urlDF <- tmpUrlDF[, Timestamp := as.POSIXct(Timestamp, origin="1970-01-01 00:00")]
  # } else {
  #   myBookmarks$urlDF <- NULL
  # }

  if(file.exists("bookmarks.rds")){
    myBookmarks$urlDF <- readRDS("bookmarks.rds")
  } else {
    myBookmarks$urlDF <- NULL
  }

  session$onSessionEnded(function() {
    tmpUrlDF <- isolate({myBookmarks$urlDF})
    if(!is.null(tmpUrlDF)){
      # dbWriteTable(con, "Bookmarks", tmpUrlDF, overwrite = TRUE)
      saveRDS(tmpUrlDF, "bookmarks.rds")
    }
    # dbDisconnect(con)
  })

  setBookmarkExclude(c("bookmarkBtn", "description", "urlTable_cell_clicked", "urlTable_rows_all", "urlTable_rows_current", "urlTable_rows_selected", "urlTable_search", "urlTable_state", "urlTable_row_last_clicked"))

  output$plot <- renderPlot({
    hist(faithful$eruptions[seq_len(input$n)], breaks = 40)
  })

  onBookmarked(fun=function(url){
    if(!url %in% myBookmarks$urlDF$URL){
      if(is.null(myBookmarks$urlDF)){
        myBookmarks$urlDF <- unique(data.table(Description = input$description, URL = paste0("<a href='", url, "'>", url,"</a>"), Timestamp = Sys.time(), Session = session$token, User = Sys.getenv("USERNAME")), by="URL")
      } else {
        myBookmarks$urlDF <- unique(rbindlist(list(myBookmarks$urlDF, data.table(Description = input$description, URL = paste0("<a href='", url, "'>", url,"</a>"), Timestamp = Sys.time(), Session = session$token, User = Sys.getenv("USERNAME")))), by="URL")
      }
    }
  })

  output$urlTable = DT::renderDataTable({
  req(myBookmarks$urlDF)
    myBookmarks$urlDF[User %in% Sys.getenv("USERNAME")]
  }, escape=FALSE)

}

enableBookmarking(store = "url")
shinyApp(ui, server)

So this works in shinyapp.io but all users can see bookmarks done by everyone. Can the user name be captured and filtered to show only those bookmarks which a particular user bookmarked? — SNT, Jan 30 '19 at 15:38
How are you planning to identify a user? Are you using any special log-in mechanism? I'm not familar with shinyapps.io. — ismirsehregal, Jan 30 '19 at 15:57
What I am trying to do was add this `User = Sys.getenv("LOGNAME"))` to ` myBookmarks$urlDF` and then filter in the outputtable like this `output$urlTable = DT::renderDataTable({ subset(myBookmarks$urlDF, User == Sys.getenv("LOGNAME")) }, escape=FALSE) ` — SNT, Jan 30 '19 at 15:59
Okay, please see my edit. I used "USERNAME" (Windows). But you need to keep in mind that `Sys.getenv` gets the variables of the server side, not the client. So I'm not sure if this really is what you are after. — ismirsehregal, Jan 30 '19 at 16:24
Got it. So when I do run this on shinyapps.io it returns the user name as Shiny. Even when I login with different users. — SNT, Jan 30 '19 at 16:25
When you are using a database later on, you could try to use the database username for this check. — ismirsehregal, Jan 30 '19 at 16:29
got it . But even then the username saved into the database will be from shinyapp user login details right. — SNT, Jan 30 '19 at 16:30
Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/187592/discussion-between-ismirsehregal-and-snt). — ismirsehregal, Jan 30 '19 at 16:31
When I use this bookmarks with navpage I am unable to retrieve the bookmarks. I did raise a new question for it : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54465075/url-bookmarking-r-shiny — SNT, Feb 01 '19 at 03:20

Bookmarking and saving the bookmarks in R shiny

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