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How to Create Dynamic Links Using R

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In Displayr, you can add links to objects and text, allowing the user to jump to a different page within your Document (Dashboard), or to a URL outside the Document. This can be time-consuming when creating a large number of links.  

Requirements

  • List of links in the form of the complete URL address, including the protocol (e.g., http, https, FTP, or mailto). 
  • Dynamically created list of URLs and their subdomains.

Method - Creating multiple links 

  1. From the toolbar, go to Calculation 26UI_Calculation.png > Custom Code. 
  2. Click on the Page where you want to position the output. 

  3. Update and insert the R code below in the R Code editor. You will need to update the links and the corresponding link_text_to_show:

    ## Enter the list of links here
links = c("https://displayr.com",
"https://www.google.com/",
"https://www.youtube.com/",
"https://www.amazon.com",
"https://bbc.co.uk ")

## Enter the labels you want to show instead of the URL itself
link_text_to_show = c("Displayr",
"Google",
"YouTube",
"Amazon",
"BBC UK")

## Create the content for the body of the html which is a list of link using the <a> tag
contents = paste('<a href="', links,'" target="_blank">', link_text_to_show, '</a>', collapse="</br>")

## Combine contents with other HTML and render using rhtmlMetro
your.html = paste('<DOCTYPE html><html><head></head><body>', contents, '</body></html>', sep="")
rhtmlMetro::Box(text = your.html, text.as.html = TRUE)
  4. Click Calculate in the object inspector 26UI_ObjectInspector.png.
    mceclip0.png

Method - Creating dynamic subdomains 

Some websites are databases.  That often means that each page on the website in question can be identified by a section of the URL. The example below uses the BBC UK website and the subsections of the main site.

  1. From the toolbar, go to Calculation 26UI_Calculation.png > Custom Code. 
  2. Click on the Page where you want to position the output. 

  3. Update and insert the code below in the R Code editor. You will need to update the base_link and the corresponding links sub-domains.:

    ## Enter the list of links here
base_link = "https://bbc.co.uk/"

## Enter the labels you want to show instead of the URL itself
links = c("news",
"sports",
"weather",
"iPlayer",
"sounds")

## Create the content for the body of the html which is a list of link using the <a> tag
contents = paste('<a href="', base_link, links,'" target="_blank">', links, '</a>', collapse="</br>")

## Combine contents with other HTML and render using rhtmlMetro
your.html = paste('<!DOCTYPE html><html><head></head><body>', contents, '</body></html>', sep="")
rhtmlMetro::Box(text = your.html, text.as.html = TRUE)
  4. Click Calculate in the object inspector 26UI_ObjectInspector.png.
    mceclip1.png

Technical Notes

If you'd like the link to open up in the current tab of your dashboard, you can replace the target="_blank" in the code above with target="_parent".

Next

How to Insert a Link into a Displayr Document

How to Publish a Document as a Web Page (Dashboard)

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