Linking to a tab or panel of a shiny app

Question

How do I manage to link from a given shiny part to parts that are located on other tabs/panels?

Update

The solution I drafted below works for the explicit case of linking to tabs/panels (and that's what I asked for).

However, I'd be interested to also know about more generic ways of linking parts of a shiny app.

Example

I'd like to link from panel A to panel B, but I'm not quite sure what I need to specify as an action when the action link in panel A is clicked.

The value #tab-4527-2 came from investigating the HTML output of ui, but I just saw that those values change each time I restart the app.

library(shiny)

# UI ---------------------------------------------------------------------

ui <- fluidPage(
  tabsetPanel(
    tabPanel(
      "A",
      p(),
      actionLink("link_to_tabpanel_b", "Link to panel B")
    ),
    tabPanel(
      "B",
      h3("Some information"),
      tags$li("Item 1"),
      tags$li("Item 2")
    )
  )
)

# Server ------------------------------------------------------------------

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observeEvent(input$link_to_tabpanel_b, {
    tags$a(href = "#tab-4527-2")
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Answer 1

The following solution is based on the inputs I got from the comments.

Note that updateTabsetPanel() belongs to shiny while updateTabItems() is a function of the shinydashboard package. They seem to work interchangeably.

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)

# UI ---------------------------------------------------------------------

ui <- fluidPage(
  tabsetPanel(
    id = "panels",
    tabPanel(
      "A",
      p(),
      actionLink("link_to_tabpanel_b", "Link to panel B")
    ),
    tabPanel(
      "B",
      h3("Some information"),
      tags$li("Item 1"),
      tags$li("Item 2"),
      actionLink("link_to_tabpanel_a", "Link to panel A")
    )
  )
)

# Server ------------------------------------------------------------------

server <- function(input, output, session) {
#   observeEvent(input$link_to_tabpanel_b, {
#     tags$a(href = "#tab-4527-2")
#   })
  observeEvent(input$link_to_tabpanel_b, {
    newvalue <- "B"
    updateTabItems(session, "panels", newvalue)
  })
  observeEvent(input$link_to_tabpanel_a, {
    newvalue <- "A"
    updateTabsetPanel(session, "panels", newvalue)
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Answer 2

You can give your tabsetPanel an id and use updateTabsetPanel with your observeEvent

library(shiny)

# UI ---------------------------------------------------------------------

ui <- fluidPage(
  tabsetPanel(id = "demo",
    tabPanel(
      "A",
      p(),
      actionLink("link_to_tabpanel_b", "Link to panel B")
    ),
    tabPanel(
      "B",
      h3("Some information"),
      tags$li("Item 1"),
      tags$li("Item 2")
    )
  )
)

# Server ------------------------------------------------------------------

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observeEvent(input$link_to_tabpanel_b, {
    updateTabsetPanel(session, "demo", "B")
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)