Feature request: input inside menuItem

[adiell]

Hi,
It would be great if input can be nested inside menuItem. For example:

ui <- dashboardPage(
  dashboardHeader(title = "Example"),
  dashboardSidebar(
    sidebarMenu(
      menuItem("Item1", tabName = "tab1",
               textInput("input1", "Enter text")),
      menuItem("Item2", tabName = "tab2",
               numericInput("input2", "Enter a number", 0))
    )
    ),
  dashboardBody(
    tabItems(
      tabItem("tab1", textOutput("text1")),
      tabItem("tab2", textOutput("text2"))
    )
  )
)
server <- shinyServer(function(input, output) {
    output$text1 <- renderText({"Text1"})
    output$text2 <- renderText({"Text2"})
})

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

The sidebar menu is actually displayed correctly but the content of the body isn't....

Thanks,
Adiel

[bborgesr]

Sorry for the very late reply.

You've run into a limitation (or, better said, a peculiarity) of menuItem()s in AdminLTE, that has also been adopted by shinydashboard. You can have two types of menuItem()s: childless ones and "childfull" ones. In your case, you have children in both menuItem()s (i.e. there's stuff that can either be expanded or collapsed). Now, if a particular menuItem() has children, that menuItem() cannot be used for navigation (so while you can pass it a tabName argument, this is basically ignored by shinydashboard).

This may seem a limitation, like I said. But I think it actually makes sense. In your app above, for example, you want a click on either of the menuItem()s to do two things simultaneously:

1. Navigate to the appropriate tabItem();
2. Display the menuItem()'s children.

I'd argue that it's best to force users to think about these as separate events and not allow them (certainly not by default) to be smashed together.

If this "smashed" behavior is super important for you, there will soon be a way to accomplish this behavior in shinydashboard soon (just finishing these changes in a separate branch right now). If you want a sneak peak, you can install that version of shinydashboard:

devtools::install_github("rstudio/shinydashboard@barbara/changes")

and run the following example:

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)

ui <- dashboardPage(
  dashboardHeader(),
  dashboardSidebar(
    sidebarMenu(
      menuItem("Item1", expandedName = "tab1",
        textInput("input1", "Enter text")),
      menuItem("Item2", expandedName = "tab2",
        numericInput("input2", "Enter a number", 0))
    )
  ),
  dashboardBody(uiOutput("body"))
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  output$body <- renderUI({
    if (is.null(input$sidebarItemExpanded)) {
      "No menuItem is expanded at the moment"
    } else if (input$sidebarItemExpanded == "tab1") {
      textOutput("text1")
    } else if (input$sidebarItemExpanded == "tab2") {
      textOutput("text2")
    }
  })
  
  output$text1 <- renderText({ paste("Your text is", input$input1) })
  output$text2 <- renderText({ paste("Your number is", input$input2) })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

As you can see, this doesn't use the tabName argument and it uses the expandedName argument instead. It also doesn't use tabItems() at all. Instead, it decides what to render in the dashboard body through uiOutput/renderUI. There's quite a bit of new stuff there. You can see a preview of the write-up that will be published on shinydashboard's website once this is released here: https://bborgesr.github.io/shinydashboard/behavior.html

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

[tobiasdirksen]

Using the above example, how do I expand a sidebarItem? UpdateTabItem doesn't work here? See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51023656/problems-with-updatetabitems-in-shinydashboard