shinyforms - Easily create questionnaire-type forms with Shiny

Copyright 2016 Dean Attali. Licensed under the MIT license.

Note: This is very much a work in progress in its baby stages. This package only has one day's worth of work in it. It's functional and works on a basic level, but there are many many more awesome things planned. I receive a lot of emails about this package, please understand it is not ready for production as it needs a lot more development. I am working on other projects as well and find it hard to find the time shinyforms deserves. If you would like to help fund/sponsor the development of shinyforms, please get in touch!

• What does shinyforms do?
• But, why?
• How do I use this?
• Current features
• Future features
• Another example
• Feedback
• Notes

What does shinyforms do?

The idea of shinyforms is to let you create questions/polls/surveys as Shiny apps very easily. Kind of like mimicking a Google Form.

But, why?

Good question. You should read my blog post where I discuss how to mimick Google Forms with Shiny, and why I originally needed to do it. I've created a few Shiny apps that request user input and save it somewhere, and I wanted to make it super streamlined for anyone else to do so in the future. You can see an live example of a Shiny form here.

How do I use this?

First, install this package from GitHub

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("daattali/shinyforms")

Then create your list of questions. Each question is a list with an id, type, title, and mandatory (mandatory is FALSE by default)

library(shiny)
library(shinyforms)

questions <- list(
  list(id = "name", type = "text", title = "Name", mandatory = TRUE),
  list(id = "age", type = "numeric", title = "Age"),
  list(id = "favourite_pkg", type = "text", title = "Favourite R package"),
  list(id = "terms", type = "checkbox", title = "I agree to the terms")
)

Then create your form information, which has an id, the list of questions, and the storage type (where responses get saved).

formInfo <- list(
  id = "basicinfo",
  questions = questions,
  storage = list(
    # Right now, only flat file storage is supported
    type = STORAGE_TYPES$FLATFILE,
    # The path where responses are stored
    path = "responses"
  )
)

That's all the information we need. Now we can add the form to a Shiny app by simply calling formUI() and formServer() from our Shiny apps' UI and server:

ui <- fluidPage(
  formUI(formInfo)
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  formServer(formInfo)
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Of course you could put more stuff in the app, but this is the beauty of it, the form is a "module" that you can just plug into any Shiny app anywhere you want. Every time you submit a response, it will be saved as a file in the responses directory. This example is the most basic usage.

Current features

• Responses are saved to local files
• Support for mandatory vs optional fields (all questions with mandatory = TRUE have to be filled out before the submit button can be clicked)
• Can create a form with only one line in the UI and one line in the server
• Can include multiple different forms in the same app
• Clean and user-friendly way to catch and report errors
• Questions and form data are in the format of R lists
• Supported question types: text, numeric, checkbox
• Ability to submit multiple responses for the same form (use multiple = FALSE in the form info list to disallow multiple submissions)
• Admin mode support: if you add ?admin=1 to the URL, you will see buttons for viewing all submitted responses below each form. If you want to see all responses, you'll have to enter a password to verify you're an admin (since anybody can just modify the URL). The password is provided by the password in the form info list.
• Support for more complex input validation that gives nice error messages when a field does not meet certain conditions (use the validations option in the form info)
• Can have an optional "Reset" button that resets the fields in the form (use the reset = TRUE parameter in the form info)
• Questions can have hint text, which is text just below the question title that gives a longer description (use the hint parameter of a question)

Future features

You can see all the features I want to support here (but it might take some time because I can't devote too much time to this package right now).

Another example

This example is similar to the previous one, but illustrates a few more features. It shows how to have two forms in one app, and how to use the admin viewing ability.

library(shiny)
library(shinyforms)

# Define the first form: basic information
basicInfoForm <- list(
  id = "basicinfo",
  questions = list(
    list(id = "name", type = "text", title = "Name", mandatory = TRUE,
         hint = "Your name exactly as it is shown on your passport"),
    list(id = "age", type = "numeric", title = "Age", mandatory = FALSE),
    list(id = "favourite_pkg", type = "text", title = "Favourite R package"),
    list(id = "terms", type = "checkbox", title = "I agree to the terms")
  ),
  storage = list(
    type = STORAGE_TYPES$FLATFILE,
    path = "responses"
  ),
  name = "Personal info",
  password = "shinyforms",
  reset = TRUE,
  validations = list(
    list(condition = "nchar(input$name) >= 3",
         message = "Name must be at least 3 characters"),
    list(condition = "input$terms == TRUE",
         message = "You must agree to the terms")
  )
)

# Define the second form: soccer
soccerFormInfo <- list(
  id = "soccerform",
  questions = list(
    list(id = "team", type = "text", title = "Favourite soccer team"),
    list(id = "player", type = "text", title = "Favourite player")
  ),
  storage = list(
    type = STORAGE_TYPES$FLATFILE,
    path = "soccer"
  ),
  multiple = FALSE
)

ui <- fluidPage(
  h1("shinyforms example"),
  tabsetPanel(
    tabPanel(
      "Basic info",
      formUI(basicInfoForm)
    ),
    tabPanel(
      "Soccer",
      formUI(soccerFormInfo)
    )
  )
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  formServer(basicInfoForm)
  formServer(soccerFormInfo)
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Notice how easy this is? After defining the forms with R lists, it's literally two function calls for each form to get it set up. A couple things to note: first, the soccer form uses the multiple = FALSE option, which means a user can only submit once (if you restart the Shiny app, the same user is able to submit the form again). Secondly, the first form uses the password option, which means that the admin table will be available IF you add ?admin=1 to the URL. To see the responses from the admin table, click on "Show responses" and type in the password "shinyforms". This app also uses several other features.

Using Google Sheets example

This example is similar to the first example, but illustrates how to use shinyforms with Google sheets as your storage type. In the example you can see that we need to first create a new Google sheet document and give it a header. From there on, we only need to pass the sheet's key to the storage list and shinyforms will do the rest.

library(shiny)
library(shinyforms)
library(googlesheets)

# Create a new google sheets file 
df <- data.frame(name = "", age = 0, favourite_pkg = "", terms = TRUE)
google_df <- gs_new("responses", input = df, trim = TRUE, verbose = FALSE)


questions <- list(
  list(id = "name", type = "text", title = "Name", mandatory = TRUE),
  list(id = "age", type = "numeric", title = "Age"),
  list(id = "favourite_pkg", type = "text", title = "Favourite R package"),
  list(id = "terms", type = "checkbox", title = "I agree to the terms")
)

formInfo <- list(
  id = "basicinfo",
  questions = questions,
  storage = list(
    # Right now, only flat file storage is supported
    type = STORAGE_TYPES$GOOGLE_SHEETS,
    # The path where responses are stored
    path = "responses",
    # Get the Google sheet key 
    key = google_df$sheet_key
    
  )
)

ui <- fluidPage(
  formUI(formInfo)
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  formServer(formInfo)
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Feedback

If you think you could have a use for shinyforms, please do let me know or file an issue. Don't be shy!

Notes

Please don't look at the code, it's hideous! This was done at runconf16 in just a few very short hours so it needs to be cleaned up quite a bit. Also, since so little time was spent building this package so far, it's very likely that the API will change. I'm completely open for input.