R

Using Crosstalk to Add User-Interactivity

The goal is to link the reactable table I created to a plotly chart and provide additional filter options that control both the table and the chart.

An important note: in order to use crosstalk, you must create a shared dataset and call that dataset within both plotly and reactable. Otherwise, your dataset will not communicate and filter with eachother. The code to do this is SharedData$new(dataset).

If you expand the code below, you’ll see that the code to build a table in reactable is quite extensive. I will not go into the details in this post, but do recommend a couple great tutorials that I used to create the interactive table such as this tutorial from Greg Lin, and this from Tom Mock which really helped me understand how to use CSS and Google fonts to enhance the visual appeal of the table (see the “Additional CSS Used for Table” section below for more info).

If you have ever built something in Shiny before, you’ll notice that the crosstalk filters are very similar. You can add a filter to any existing column in the dataset. As you can see in the code below, I used a mixture of filter_checkbox and filter_select depending on how many unique options were available in the column you’re filtering. My rule of thumb is if there are more than five options to choose from it’s probably better to put them into a list in filter_select like I did with the Division filtering as to not take up too much space on the page.

For the layout of the data visualization, I used bscols to place the crosstalk filters side-by-side with the interactive plotly chart. I then placed the reactable table underneath and added a legend to the table using tags from the htmltools package. The final result is shown below. Feel free to click around and the filters and you will notice that both the plot and the table will filter accordingly. Another option is to drag and click on the plot and you will see the table underneath mimic the teams shown.