How to avoid collapsing with shinyWidgets dropdown and a datatable

Question

I want to display a spreadsheet with some information in shinyWidgets dropdown, sometimes spanning multiple pages.

If you click on the next page, the dropdown closes again.
How can I avoid this?

library(shiny)
library(shinyWidgets)

ui <- fluidPage(
  br(),br(),br(),
  p("How to go to the next page, without collapsing?"),
  uiOutput("irisdrop", inline = TRUE)
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  output$irisdrop <- renderUI({
    dropdown(circle = FALSE, inputId = "iris",
             label = "iris", status = "primary", 
             datatable(iris, rownames = NULL,
                       height = "100%",
                       selection = "none"
             )
    )
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Answer 1

You can do something like this -

library(shiny)
library(shinyWidgets)
library(DT)


ui <- fluidPage(
  dropdownButton(
    inputId = "iris",
    label = "iris",
    icon = icon("sliders"),
    status = "primary",
    circle = FALSE,
    DT::dataTableOutput("iris_tb")
  )
)


server <- function(input, output, session) {

  output$iris_tb <- DT::renderDataTable({

    datatable(iris, rownames = NULL,
              height = "100%",
              selection = "none"
    )

  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Note: You can even use dropdown() instead of dropdownButton() from shinyWidgets package.

dropdown() is similar to dropdownButton() but it don't use Bootstrap, so you can put pickerInput in it. Moreover you can add animations on the appearance / disappearance of the dropdown with animate.css.

For more detail, you can look at the page 30 of the following document -

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shinyWidgets/shinyWidgets.pdf