hotwidget

The goal of hotwidget is to provide an interface to the handsontable.js library. This is mainly intended to use with {Shiny}. The package is still in development and is not yet available on CRAN.

The reason for this package is that rhandsontable is not being developed beyond version 0.3.8 due to the need for a license in the case of commercial use. However, if you have a license, you can use hotwidget for commercial use.

I’ve tried to send as little data from client to server in order to handle larger data sets. The function hotwidget_update() can be used to update the data that you insert into hotwidget(). You do need to pass a reactive object though.

If you would like to independently handle the changes in the client, you can listen to the various ported hooks from handsontable.js.

• afterChange
• afterCreateRow
• afterRemoveRow
• afterUndo
• afterRedo

Column adding/removing is not implemented yet.

The listeners update when triggered (so they are NULL at initialization) and can be accessed via input${name_of_widget}_afterchange for example. I would suggest you use these hooks if you want to use R to communicate database updates.

For a more detailed description, take a look at inst/htmlwidgets/hotwidget.js.

Installation

You can install the development version of hotwidget from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("vreederene-90/hotwidget")

Examples

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(hotwidget)
hotwidget(head(iris))

A basic Shiny app with hotwidget

library(hotwidget)
run_app <-
  function(
      hotwidget_data =
        iris |>
          janitor::clean_names() |>
          mutate(
            .before = 1,
            index = row_number(),
            test = as_date(paste(Sys.Date()))
          ) |>
          head(6)) {
    ui <- fluidPage(
      fluidRow(
        column(
          width = 6,
          textInput("name", "name dataset", value = "dataset"),
          hotwidgetOutput("hotwidget"),
          selectInput(
            "select",
            multiple = T,
            choices = c("species", "sepal_length", "sepal_width", "petal_length", "petal_width", "index", "test"),
            label = "select",
            selected = "species"
          )
        ),
        column(
          width = 6,
          h5("hotwidget_data_updated"),
          shiny::verbatimTextOutput("table"),
          column(
            width = 6,
            h5("undo data passed via hotwidget.js"),
            shiny::verbatimTextOutput("undo")
          ),
          column(
            width = 6,
            h5("redo data passed via hotwidget.js"),
            shiny::verbatimTextOutput("redo")
          )
        )
      )
    )

    server <- function(input, output, session) {
      hotwidget_update(input, "hotwidget", hotwidget_data_rv, verbose = TRUE)

      hotwidget_data_rv <- reactiveVal()

      observe(
        hotwidget_data_rv(hotwidget_data |> select(any_of(input$select)))
      )

      output$hotwidget <-
        renderHotwidget({
          hotwidget(
            columnSorting = FALSE,
            undo = TRUE,
            rowHeaders = TRUE,
            licenseKey = "non-commercial-and-evaluation",
            data = isolate(hotwidget_data_rv())
          )
        }) |> bindEvent(input$select)

      output$undo <- renderPrint(input$hotwidget_afterundo)
      output$redo <- renderPrint(input$hotwidget_afterredo)

      output$table <- renderPrint(hotwidget_data_rv())

      session$onSessionEnded(
        function() {
          assign(
            x = isolate(input$name),
            value = isolate(hotwidget_data_rv()),
            envir = .GlobalEnv
          )
        }
      )
    }
    shinyApp(ui, server)
  }