School’s out: Building Interactive R Apps with shiny, googleVis in our R Academy

In our R Academy course “Interactive Datavisualization with R” participants learned today how to build interactive graphics in R using the shiny and the googleVis package.

Interactive Web Application with R

Rstudios shiny package is a great way to build an Application for interactive visualizations out of R.
For our example App we recreated Hans Rosslings (Gapminder) Visualization which puts a countries Life-Expectancy in relation with its Gross-Domestic-Product.

We used the data from datamarket.com via the rdatamarket Package. We combined data from Gapminder(Population), the World Bank (GDP) and from the United Nations (Life-Expectancy) with each other. Datamarket.com even offers an R-console snippet for importing the data directly into R (Under Export).

The following lines of code shows what you need to do. Have fun with  R in the web.

# TODO: Add comment
# 
# Author: msc
###############################################################################

library("rdatamarket")
library("shiny")


#getting Data from datamarket.com
#life_expectancy and gdp
dminit("ba22bf5bdf044aaf980cdbde3504248c")
life_expectancy <- dmlist("15r2!hrp")
gdp <- dmlist("15c9!hd1")

#population
dminit("ba22bf5bdf044aaf980cdbde3504248c")
population <- dmlist("1cfl!r3d")


#renaming the value variable
names(gdp)[3] <- "GDP"
names(life_expectancy)[3] <- "life_expectancy"
names(population)[3] <- "Population"

#merge to one dataframe
data <- merge(gdp,life_expectancy, by = c("Country","Year"))
data <- merge(data, population, by = c("Country","Year"))

#data is only until 2008 complete
data < - data[data$Year 

# TODO: Add comment
# 
# Author: msc
###############################################################################


if(!"googleVis"%in%installed.packages())install.packages("googleVis", repos = "http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/misc/cran/")
library("googleVis")

shinyServer(function(input, output) {
			
			load("data.RData")
			
			data$Population <- data$Population/1000
									
			output$main_plot <- renderGvis({
						
						if(input$xAchse == "log. GDB"){
							data$GDP <- log(data$GDP)
						}else{
							data$GDP <- data$GDP
						}
						
						if(input$all == TRUE){
							country_filter <- input$country_filter1
						}
						if(input$all == FALSE){
							country_filter <- input$country_filter2
						}
						
												
						#it seems that gvisMotionChart needs different variables for idvar and colorvar
						data$CountryCol <- data$Country
												
						gvisMotionChart(data[data$Country %in% country_filter,],
								idvar = "Country",
								timevar = "Year",
								xvar = "GDP",
								yvar = "life_expectancy",
								colorvar = "CountryCol",
								sizevar = "Population",
								options = list(showChartButtons = FALSE,
										       showSidePanel = FALSE,
											   showXScalePicker = FALSE,
											   showYScalePicker = FALSE)
								)
						
						
					})
			
			output$map <- renderGvis({
						
						if(input$all == TRUE){
							country_filter <- input$country_filter1
						}
						if(input$all == FALSE){
							country_filter <- input$country_filter2
						}
						
						year_filter <- input$year_filter
						
						data$hover <- paste0("Life-Expectancy ",data$Country,": ",round(data$life_expectancy))
						
						gvisGeoChart(data[data$Country %in% country_filter & data$Year == year_filter,], locationvar = "Country", colorvar = "GDP", hovervar = "hover")
					})
			
			
		})







 


# TODO: Add comment
# 
# Author: msc
###############################################################################

library("shiny")

if(!"googleVis"%in%installed.packages())install.packages("googleVis", repos = "http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/misc/cran/")
library("googleVis")

load('data.RData')

#Buiding a HTML Table

shinyUI(pageWithSidebar(
				headerPanel(tags$body(tags$img(src="eoda_logo.png", width = "400px", align ="right"),
								       h1("Life-Expectancy ~ GDP per capita"),
									   h2("(random Country preselection)"),
									   h5("sometimes changes doen't take effect immediatly in this case please refresh the whole page"))),
					   
				sidebarPanel(
						selectInput('xAchse', 'X Axis', c('GDP', 'log. GDB')),
						checkboxInput(inputId = 'all',label = 'all countries', value = TRUE),
						conditionalPanel(condition = 'input.all == true',
								checkboxGroupInput(inputId = 'country_filter1',
										label = 'Countries', unique(data$Country),
										selected = unique(data$Country))),
						conditionalPanel(condition = 'input.all == false',
								checkboxGroupInput('country_filter2',
										label = 'Countries', choices = unique(data$Country)))
				),
				mainPanel(h3("MotionChart"),
						  h4("(circle-size = population in tsd)"),
						  htmlOutput(outputId = "main_plot"),
						  h3("World Map"),
						  h4("(colour range = GDP per capita/ additional Life-Expectancy per MouseOver Effect)"),
						  htmlOutput(outputId = "map"),
						  sliderInput(inputId = "year_filter",
								      label = "Year",
									  min = 1960,
									  max = 2008,
						              value = 2008,
									  format = "####")
						 )
		))

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