In addition, the vertical and horizontal positions and sizes are expressed in fractions (read: percentages), so there are no absolute positions. Except that in D3, the 0,0 coordinates are top/left, as opposed to bottom/left, so we have to flip our thinking upside down when we create a visualization with D3. Picture that what you are drawing for a bar plot are the actual rectangles, almost as if you’re using geom_rect(). One thing that helped was to realize that D3 and ggplot2 are similar in the amount of flexibility they offer.

The more I learn to use it, the more I like its flexibility as a stand-alone visualization language. I’ve since discovered that D3 is a language with which the desired result can be obtained by using one of several coding approaches. Nevertheless, my naivete and stubbornness prevailed. If he says it’s hard, then I’m in for a world of hurt. This person has forgotten more than I will ever learn about pretty much any subject. A few months ago, I told him that I wanted to start using r2d3 but was struggling with making heads or tails of D3.

The title is a quote of a luminary in the R community. If we wish to offer an alternative to enterprise reporting and BI tools by using Shiny, we need to do our best to match the interactivity those other tools seem to offer out of the box. Sadly though, it seems that very few do it. Adding interactive plots is one of the most important capabilities to include in a Shiny app. She was able to run it easily, but then told me that she didn’t know that she was supposed to click on things. I asked a good friend at work to help me test the sample app provided in this post. With r2d3 there is more work, but the gains in customization and interactivity make it by far the best choice, in my opinion. However, while they are great for client-side interactivity, I often hit walls with them when I try to add click-through interactivity because the functionality is either not there, is very limited, or is bloated. When looking for options, I found that htmlwidgets were the closest to what companies usually expect. I was mainly focused on recreating functionality found in other “dashboarding” applications. I wish this post existed when I was struggling to add interactive plots to my Shiny app.

Rstudio shiny app