Use multiple R Markdown files in Shiny tabs

Question

I am building a Shiny App and I'd like to have multiple tabsets. The code I've got so far gives me that:

shinyUI(navbarPage("OEI Grant",
  tabPanel("Part 1 - Organization",
           tabsetPanel("1.x",
                       tabPanel("1.1"),
                       tabPanel("1.2"),
                       tabPanel("1.3")
                       ))))

The part I cannot figure out is how to get a separate interactive document (R markdown .Rmd file) for each tab (1.1, 1.2, etc.).

I am looking for the equivalent of the includeMarkdown() function but for R Markdown files that themselves contain Shiny Apps.

For example in 1.1 I may want to display the output from the following simple .Rmd file:

---
runtime: shiny
---
# Data visualization

Example visualization

```{r read-in-data, echo = FALSE, eval=TRUE, message=TRUE}
library(ggplot2)
data(OrchardSprays) # Use this data                                                                                                                                                                            
head(OrchardSprays)
```

## Histogram

We can also look at this data in an interactive histogram.

```{r histogram, echo = FALSE, eval=TRUE}
shinyAppDir(
    "histogram/",
    options=list(width="100%", height=450)
  )
```

This RTutor Shiny App is something similar to what I'm trying to do as far as multiple tabs but from looking at their code, I think everything is provided in one R markdown file and somehow parsed into different sections.

R Markdown documentation talks about linking multiple pages but I want the content and not links.

The only example in the Gallery for Tabsets shows how to put output from server.R into different tabs but not separate R Markdown files.

Any ideas on how to do this?

Answer 1

As an alternative to the approach mentioned in earlier answer you may want to try the approach illustrated in this repo https://github.com/vnijs/shiny-site. This is a proof of concept that you can render rmarkdown files using Knitr within a shiny without app having to break up the file into parts. It works by using Shiny's renderUI functionality and evaluating the rmarkdown file in the shinyServer environment.