Using Quarto to produce HTML to document for inserting in a multi page Dashboard

[cderv]

Description

My goal is to create a dashboard that shows the results of a single analysis, but to let the user select the dataset on which the analysis was performed. Because the analysis is time-consuming, I don't want to just create a shiny dashboard that performs each analysis on the fly. I thought a solution would be to create an html fragment with the results of each analysis, then create a shiny dashboard that lets the user select which pre-compiled html fragment to display. (I would prefer an html document rather than a shiny dashboard just so no backend server is required, but I'm not if that's a built-in option, and the html document might be prohibitively large over time.) It seems that the best option might be to use a shiny dashboard that displays full html files in an iframe. (Although I now see that it is possible to create shiny cache that persists across sessions, so maybe that's the best option.)

Originally posted by @philipshirk in quarto-dev/quarto-r#73 (comment)

[cderv]

Because the analysis is time-consuming, I don't want to just create a shiny dashboard that performs each analysis on the fly. I thought a solution would be to create an html fragment with the results of each analysis, then create a shiny dashboard that lets the user select which pre-compiled html fragment to display.

If you are considering Shiny for interactivity, you can go with a single Quarto Dashboard https://quarto.org/docs/dashboards/interactivity/
And to avoid computation, instead of pre-rendered HTML you could save your results datasets or your plots on disk.

You would could then load them based on user's selection.

(I would prefer an html document rather than a shiny dashboard just so no backend server is required, but I'm not if that's a built-in option, and the html document might be prohibitively large over time.)

If you don't want shiny, you could create a Quarto website with all your rendered document and use navigation in navbar or sidebar to allow user to good only to the page about the dataset chosen.

If you want to have a dropdown selection, you could have a table on your homepage with links to the page of the dataset chosen for example. Just ideas. About website navigation : https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html

If you go this road, you could be interested in the Freeze feature of Quarto - https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#freeze
This will allow your quarto render to be quite fast and execute your computations only the new pages.

This is just ideas - there are other type of design you could think off leveraging different features to achieve what you need.

Creating HTML fragment is also one of them - Quarto does not have a HTML fragment format, so you would have to tweak the template. Then if you insert this in your HTML page dynamically, you need to be sure the the JS / CSS dependencies of your fragment document is correctly included in your main page website where you include it.

Anyhow, hope these ideas will help.