Record Everything that Happens in a 'Shiny' Application

Track and record the use of applications and the user's interactions with 'Shiny' inputs. Allows to trace the inputs with which the user interacts, the outputs generated, as well as the errors displayed in the interface.

Installation

You can install from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("dreamRs/shinylogs")

Usage

Call track_usage in your server function, it will record:

• inputs : each time an input change, name, timestamp and value will be saved
• errors : errors propagated through outputs
• outputs : each time an output is re-generated
• session : informations about the browser and the application

New inputs are created to expose those data, you can access them with .shinylogs_input, .shinylogs_error, .shinylogs_output and .shinylogs_browserData. An additional input is also created to expose the last input modified by the user: .shinylogs_lastInput.

When application is closed (in fact on session ended), a JSON is created in a subfolder of app's directory.

Example:

# Shiny server
function(input, output, session) {
 
  track_usage(storage_mode = store_json(path = "logs/"))
  
}

Example of JSON created (with the Kmeans example app)

{
   "inputs":[
      {
         "name":"ycol",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:40+02:00",
         "value":"Sepal.Width",
         "type":"",
         "binding":"shiny.selectInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"ycol",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:35+02:00",
         "value":"Petal.Width",
         "type":"",
         "binding":"shiny.selectInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"clusters",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:37+02:00",
         "value":5,
         "type":"shiny.number",
         "binding":"shiny.numberInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"xcol",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:33+02:00",
         "value":"Sepal.Length",
         "type":"",
         "binding":"shiny.selectInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"clusters",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:37+02:00",
         "value":4,
         "type":"shiny.number",
         "binding":"shiny.numberInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"ycol",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:38+02:00",
         "value":"Species",
         "type":"",
         "binding":"shiny.selectInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"clusters",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:37+02:00",
         "value":5,
         "type":"shiny.number",
         "binding":"shiny.numberInput"
      },
      {
         "name":"xcol",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:32+02:00",
         "value":"Sepal.Width",
         "type":"",
         "binding":"shiny.selectInput"
      }
   ],
   "errors":[
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:39+02:00",
         "error":"NA/NaN/Inf in foreign function call (arg 1)"
      }
   ],
   "outputs":[
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:41+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      },
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:35+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      },
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:33+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      },
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:37+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      },
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:32+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      },
      {
         "name":"plot1",
         "timestamp":"2019-04-07T13:39:37+02:00",
         "binding":"shiny.imageOutput"
      }
   ],
   "session":[
      {
         "app":"kmeans-example",
         "user":"pvictor",
         "server_connected":"2019-04-07T13:39:30+0200",
         "sessionid":"e32af32f5b664b6db175aaac1e0cd70a",
         "server_disconnected":"2019-04-07T13:39:42+0200",
         "user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.86 Safari/537.36",
         "screen_res":"1920x1080",
         "browser_res":"1273x909",
         "pixel_ratio":1,
         "browser_connected":"2019-04-07T13:39:31+02:00"
      }
   ]
}