Help Menu in the Shiny Dashboard Header

[jeganathan-velu]

Hi,

Thanks for the great work. We are using shiny dashboard framework for org level BI portal.

Will it be possible to add " Help Menu" type in the Shiny dashboard header options ? some thing similar to notification menu type or message menu type under dropdownMenu().

This will help us to link to HTML page indexes for dashboard related guide and help files.

[bborgesr]

Can you elaborate on what functionality you need that is not already in this package?

I.e. dropdownMenu is flexible enough that you can use it for just about anything. For example, is there anything lacking in the following example?:

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
library(DT)

shinyApp(
  ui = dashboardPage(
    dashboardHeader(
      dropdownMenu(
        type = "notifications", 
        icon = icon("question-circle"),
        badgeStatus = NULL,
        headerText = "See also:",

        notificationItem("shiny", icon = icon("file"),
          href = "http://shiny.rstudio.com/"),
        notificationItem("shinydashboard", icon = icon("file"),
          href = "https://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/")
      )
    ), 
    dashboardSidebar(), 
    dashboardBody()
  ),
  server = function(input, output, session) {}
)

[jeganathan-velu]

Thanks for the response. The response was very helpful. I am yet to gain proficiency in shiny framework and hence was under the wrong impression that notification menus are limited to usage descriptions provided here : https://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/structure.html#notification-menus

[bborgesr]

No worries, glad this solves your use case!

[kovla]

I wonder if it should be possible to include Shiny widgets (e.g., selectInput) in the header. In my own case, the user wants a single set of data filters, which would be propagated to all dashboard pages. These filters should be visible from any page, too. One could use the siderbar for that, of course, but in this case, the sidebar would be used to navigate between pages.

[debanjanabanerjee]

Can someone please let me know if we can include a downloadbutton inside the header in shiny?

[oganm]

@debanjanabanerjee this is a few years late but I found a workaround and no discussion anywhere else on the topic. You can add any widget within a header by cheating a little and doing something like

dashboardHeader(
    tags$li(actionButton('whatever','whatever'),
            class= 'dropdown'))

to trick dashboardHeader's checks and add any widget you want into the header.

I am unsure why it was designed to refuse any non-dashboard-sanctioned-dropdown-element by default though. It seems long items break the header's looks at the intersection point with the sidebar so any added item should have a limited height (50px by default).