box() function masked by graphics package

[theGreatWhiteShark]

First of all: great package. But yesterday I discovered that my shiny app and even the minimal version of the shinydashboard example won't run on my machine (R3.3.0, shiny0.14, shinydashboard0.5.3 ) anymore.

The errors look like this: Error in box(plotOutput("plot1", height = 250)) : plot.new has not been called yet

After some digging I found the source of the problem to be the masking of the shinydashboard::box() function by graphics::box().

This is quite odd since the package was loaded after the base one and the //NAMESPACE of the package seems legit. (I use install_github())

Replacing all box() by shinydashboard::box() fixed my app. But there is certainly a better way of doing it.

Cheers, Phil

[wch]

That's really strange -- it sounds like the graphics package was loaded after shinydashboard in your R session. I can't imagine how that would happen, since graphics is one of the base packages that is loaded when R starts

How were you running your application -- in an R session or with Shiny Server (or something else)? And did you compile R yourself?

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Yeah, its really strange. ~/tmp $ R

require( shinydashboard ) box function (which = "plot", lty = "solid", ...) { which <- pmatch(which[1L], c("plot", "figure", "inner", "outer")) .External.graphics(C_box, which = which, lty = lty, ...) invisible() } <bytecode: 0x8fbaf70>

And yes, I compiled R myself. But I did since I started to use the language two years ago. Such things have not happened yet.

But I just realized the error does not show up when starting R without the .Rprofile. I will check package causes the problem.

[wch]

Can you run the following in a new R session and paste the output in a comment?

sessionInfo()
library(shinydashboard)
sessionInfo()
box

Also, please run the same commands after starting R with R --vanilla and paste them as well.

Finally, if you have the commands you used to configure and compile R, it would be helpful if you could provide those as well.

[wch]

Also, this may be relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/a/26935536/412655

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Okay, the problem seems to be at another point:

I wrote my own package including a shiny app based on shinydashboard. And though putting shinydashboard in the //DESCRIPTION:Depends and adding "import( shinydashboard )" to the //NAMESPACE the shinydashboard::box() function was not imported into the package's namespace.

This is nevertheless quite odd since all the other shinydashboard functions are available. (I do not import the graphics package)

[wch]

Two things:

• It's good practice to put packages in Imports instead of Depends, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. It's possible that this is causing the problem.
• You can try importing the specific object with importFrom(shinydashboard,box).

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Nice. Thanks a lot! I must had overlooked the 'Imports" feature when I read Hadley's package book.

importFrom I only use for packages from which I just use one or two functions. But thanks again for the advice.

[wch]

Great!