Linked plots without using Shiny

Question

I have created a shiny app to show a correlation heatmap for a large dataset. When the heatmap tiles are pressed, the corresponding scatterplots are displayed.

However, I need to make several of these apps and this exceeds my limit of publishing on shinyapps.io. My company is unwilling to upgrade to a paying plan. I have tried using alternative methods to publish the app such as RInno, to no avail (I think the app is too complex?).

If someone could please tell me how I could produce the same with plotly alone and NOT with shiny, I would be forever grateful. I believe something like crosstalk might be the path to take in order to link the heat map tiles to the scatter plots?

Thank you

Example from here.

library(plotly)
library(shiny)

# compute a correlation matrix
correlation <- round(cor(mtcars), 3)
nms <- names(mtcars)

ui <- fluidPage(
  mainPanel(
    plotlyOutput("heat"),
    plotlyOutput("scatterplot")
  ),
  verbatimTextOutput("selection")
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  output$heat <- renderPlotly({
    plot_ly(x = nms, y = nms, z = correlation, 
            key = correlation, type = "heatmap", source = "heatplot") %>%
      layout(xaxis = list(title = ""), 
             yaxis = list(title = ""))
  })

  output$selection <- renderPrint({
    s <- event_data("plotly_click")
    if (length(s) == 0) {
      "Click on a cell in the heatmap to display a scatterplot"
    } else {
      cat("You selected: \n\n")
      as.list(s)
    }
  })

  output$scatterplot <- renderPlotly({
    s <- event_data("plotly_click", source = "heatplot")
    if (length(s)) {
      vars <- c(s[["x"]], s[["y"]])
      d <- setNames(mtcars[vars], c("x", "y"))
      yhat <- fitted(lm(y ~ x, data = d))
      plot_ly(d, x = ~x) %>%
        add_markers(y = ~y) %>%
        add_lines(y = ~yhat) %>%
        layout(xaxis = list(title = s[["x"]]), 
               yaxis = list(title = s[["y"]]), 
               showlegend = FALSE)
    } else {
      plotly_empty()
    }
  })

}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Answer 1

The best answer would likely be to use crosstalk in conjunction with flexdashboard https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/flexdashboard/.

A live example of using both be found here: http://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/209203_02f14fea3274448bbbf8d04c99c6051b.html.

The end result is just an html page which is easy to share and use. Based on your example you shouldn't need shiny and it you should be able to use crosstalk for this use case. You'd need to step outside of R to get that functionality otherwise. Best of luck!