Update input UI when calling Shiny.setInputValue

Consider this sample shiny application. You can type in a car name like "Valiant" and it will print out the MPG value from the mtcars built-in data set. I also wanted to allow the user to click on a car rather than type it. I did this by generating a list of links with car names and writing a bit of javascript to call Shiny.setInputValue when the link is clicked.

I noticed that when a link is clicked, the server state updates (ie the textOutput("MPG") value changes) but the text box doesn't update to show the current value. Is there a different way to get the value such that the textInput is updated AND the reactive textOutput is updated?

library(shiny)    script <- "$(document).on('click', '.name-opt a', function (evt) {    evt.preventDefault(); Shiny.setInputValue('name',this.dataset.name);  });"    ui <- fluidPage(    tags$head(tags$script(HTML(script))),    textInput("name", "Name:"),    textOutput("MPG"),    uiOutput("carlist")  )    server <- function(input, output, session) {    output$carlist <- renderUI({      tags$ul(        Map(function(v) tags$li(tags$a(v, href="#", "data-name"=v)), rownames(head(mtcars, 20))),         class="name-opt")    })    output$MPG <- renderText({      req(input$name)      paste(input$name, "mpg:", mtcars[input$name,]$mpg)    })  }    shinyApp(ui, server)  

Tested with shiny_1.5.0

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67030306/update-input-ui-when-calling-shiny-setinputvalue April 10, 2021 at 10:34AM