Render rCharts in slides from Slidify

Question

Recently I have been experimenting with slidify and rCharts. Tutorials for generating simple charts while using slidify are explanatory, but I was unable to find any such tutorial regarding rCharts.

For example, I know that the following generates an interactive plot

data(mtcars)    
r1<- rPlot(mpg ~ wt | am + vs, data=mtcars, type="point")
data(iris)
hair_eye = as.data.frame(HairEyeColor)
rPlot(Freq ~ Hair | Eye,color = 'Eye', data = hair_eye, type = 'bar')

However, I have no idea how to incorporate the resulting plot into my slides using slidify.

EDIT - After the helpful comment

I tried the following, having seen it on Ramnath's git:

---
title       : Practice
subtitle    : makes perfect
author      : Noob
job         : 
framework   : io2012        # {io2012, html5slides, shower, dzslides, ...}
highlighter : highlight.js  # {highlight.js, prettify, highlight}
hitheme     : tomorrow      # 
widgets     : [nvd3]            # {mathjax, quiz, bootstrap}
mode        : selfcontained # {standalone, draft}
---

```{r setup, message = F, echo = F}
require(rCharts)
options(RCHART_WIDTH = 800, RCHART_HEIGHT = 500)
knitr::opts_chunk$set(comment = NA, results = 'asis', tidy = F, message = F)
```


## NVD3 Scatterplot

```{r echo = F}
data(mtcars)
n1 <- nPlot(mpg ~ wt, group = 'gear', data = mtcars, type = 'scatterChart')
n1$print('chart1')
```

But ended up with this error:

Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(con, "r") :
  cannot open file 'libraries/widgets/nvd3/nvd3.html': No such file or directory

After which I decided to copy the nvd3 folder from Ramnath's widgets directly into mine, hoping that this would solve the matter. However, this ended up crazily showing Ramnath's git page as well as my slides in the background!

What to do? I would really appreciate any guidelines/pointers/advice on how to accomplish this task. And, I hope this question aids other novices like myself in using the wonderful rCharts.

Note: I am using the standard editor for R, not R-studio. I feel the former is less cluttered.

Answer 1

All instructions below assume that you have the dev branch of the packages installed (slidify, slidifyLibraries and rCharts). You can accomplish this using install_github.

pkgs <- c("slidify", "slidifyLibraries", "rCharts")
devtools::install_github(pkgs, "ramnathv", ref = "dev")

There are two ways to include an rCharts viz in your slidify document, and the deck below illustrates both ways. If you print a plot in a code chunk, as you would do so in the R console, slidify automatically detects that you are running it in a knitr session and as a result save the resulting html to an iframe and embed it in the deck. Alternately, you can specify the chart inline, in which case you have to use n1$show("inline") and also include ext_widgets: {rCharts: libraries/nvd3} in your YAML front matter.

The iframe method is the default and the recommended method to avoid conflicts between various javascript files and css. The inline method does work well for several rCharts libraries, but make sure to check before you use.

---
title       : rCharts Integration
ext_widgets : {rCharts: libraries/nvd3}
mode: selfcontained
---

## NVD3 Plot Inline

```{r nvd3plot, results = 'asis', comment = NA, message = F, echo = F}
require(rCharts)
n1 <- nPlot(mpg ~ wt, data = mtcars, type = 'scatterChart')
n1$show('inline')
```

---

## NVD3 Plot Iframe

```{r nvd3plot2, results = 'asis', comment = NA, message = F, echo = F} 
require(rCharts)
n1 <- nPlot(mpg ~ wt, data = mtcars, type = 'scatterChart')
n1
```