Discovering the scope of the Shiny user interface

After you know how to build a simple Shiny application, as well as how reactivity works, let us take a look at the next step: the various resources to create a custom user interface. Furthermore, there are nearly endless possibilities to shape the look and feel of the layout. As already mentioned, the entire HTML, CSS, and JavaScript logic and functions of the layout options are based on the highly flexible bootstrap framework. And, of course, everything is responsive by default, which makes it possible for the final application layout to adapt to the screen of any device.

Exploring the Shiny interface layouts

Currently, there are four common shinyUI() page layouts:

• pageWithSidebar()
• fluidPage()
• navbarPage()
• fixedPage()

These page layouts can be, in turn, structured with different functions for a custom inner arrangement structure of the page layout. In the following sections, we are introducing the most useful inner layout functions. As an example...