Interactive Dashboards

Overview

Adding interactivity to a dashboard helps users explore the concepts and data you are presenting more deeply. There are several ways to add interactive components to Quarto dashboards:

• Shiny for Python for dashboards that use Jupyter for computations (requires a server component for deployment).

• Shiny for R for dashboards that use Knitr for computations (requires a server component for deployment).

• Observable JS for client-side interactivity using the Observable dialect of JavaScript.

• Jupyter Widgets or htmlwidgets for client-side interactivity based on standard Python and R JavaScript widget frameworks.

Using Shiny-based interactivity is generally much more flexible and capable than client-only interactivity, however requires a server for deployment.

Input Layout

No matter which type of interactivity you choose, you’ll want to present user inputs in a clear, accessible fashion. While you can locate inputs anywhere within a dashboard, there are some special containers that are tuned for this purpose:

• Sidebars provide a collapsible, full height panel for inputs.

• Toolbars provide a full page width horizontal panel for inputs.

• Card Inputs are directly embedded in the cards either as a card toolbar or as a card sidebar.

The article on Inputs covers these methods in depth along with tips on doing more sophisticated layout of groups of inputs.