A basic touch screen keyboard for R shiny apps.
To install, run:
if (!require(devtools)) {
install.packages('devtools')
}
devtools::install_github('Emelieh21/shinykeyboard')
This package contains two functions: generateVirtualKeyboard() and activateVirtualKeyboard().
The input for the generateVirtualKeyboard() is the inputId (or a list of multiple inputId's) of the textInput() fields. The touch screen keyboard will open automatically when any of these input field are clicked. generateVirtualKeyboard() needs to be executed before the ui is generated, and the activateVirtualKeyboard() function within the ui.
For usage see the following example:
apps.R
library(shiny)
library(shinykeyboard)
textIds = c("text", "text2")
keyboard <- generateVirtualKeyboard(textIds)
ui <- fluidPage(
activateVirtualKeyboard(keyboard),
textInput("text","Write something:"),
textInput("text2","Write something more:"),
textOutput("content")
)
server <- function(input, output, session){
output$content <- renderText({
paste0(input$text," ",input$text2)
})
}
shinyApp(ui,server)
The integrated virtual keyboard is a jQuery on-screen keyboard (OSK) plugin that works in the browser. Originally posted by Jeremy Satterfield in his blog, jQuery plugins and on Snipplr. Currently maintained by Mottie. For more information, see the keyboards' repository here.
I needed a virtual keyboard for a R Shiny app running on my touch screen Raspberry Pi, because (unlike IPad's and smartphones) this device doesn't open a keyboard automatically when a text input field is clicked. To install the shinykeyboard package with devtools, you might need to install devtools first. If the installation of devtools gives you errors, it might be that you need to install the following two dependencies first:
sudo apt-get install libgit2-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
Feel free to contribute and improve this keyboard integration. It should be totally possible to have more options to customize the layout. I am not the biggest JS star (honestly, I don't know JS at all), so please, feel very welcome to improve the scripts.