Empty State Components for 'Shiny'

Offers a comprehensive solution for managing 'empty states' in 'Shiny' applications. It provides tools to create both default and customizable components for scenarios where data is absent or doesn't match user-defined filters. The package prioritizes user experience, ensuring clarity and consistency even when data is not available to display.

shiny.emptystate

Empty state components for Shiny.

Empty states are situations where there is no data to display to the user. A good example is an empty shopping cart on an e-commerce site.

In the context of dashboards you can encounter empty states when:

Before displaying any charts a user needs to upload a file containing the required data
Users apply different filters to a dataset and there is no row matching the configured filters

The goal of this package is to make it easy to handle empty states in your shiny applications.

How to install?

remotes::install_github("Appsilon/shiny.emptystate")

How to use it?

To start using shiny.emptystate, you need to:

Include use_empty_state() in your UI definition
Define the content you want to display as an empty state (e.g. a message)
Create an instance of the EmptyStateManager class where you define by the id which element of your app should be covered with the empty state content
Use its show and hide methods to show or hide the empty state content depending on your custom logic (e.g. nrow(data_to_display) > 0)

library(shiny)
library(shiny.emptystate)
library(reactable)

ui <- fluidPage(
  use_empty_state(),
  actionButton("show", "Show empty state!"),
  actionButton("hide", "Hide empty state!"),
  reactableOutput("my_table")
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  empty_state_content <- div(
    "This is  example empty state content"
  )

  empty_state_manager <- EmptyStateManager$new(
    id = "my_table",
    html_content = empty_state_content
  )

  observeEvent(input$show, {
    empty_state_manager$show()
  })

  observeEvent(input$hide, {
    empty_state_manager$hide()
  })

  output$my_table <- reactable::renderReactable({
    reactable(iris)
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

For more examples of empty state components, please see this demo.