Is there a way to pop out a leaflet map in an R Shiny app into a new browser tab?

Question

I'm making an R Shiny application that includes a leafletOutput map that maps certain datapoints from a filtered dataframe. Is there any way to expand that map to a full screen size in a new browser tab such that it includes the same mapped points as the original map at the time of showing it in the new tab?

I know you can make different tabs within R shiny itself, but this is not what I want. The only possible solution I've considered is making another shiny application that is a slimmed down version of the original one (it only includes the maps and the filtered data to put on the map). The user would access the secondary app from the primary app to view the full screen app by clicking a button that would open a new browser tab, and using URL parameters, would tell the secondary app which criteria to filter points on the map by. This solution seems clunky and inefficient in my mind.

Is there a more elegant way to solve this issue?

I haven't put any code since I'm asking for a general approach, but I can edit my question to include some if that would be better.

Answer 1

You could save the leaflet as stand alone HTML file and use browseURL to show it in a new tab. At least locally that should work fine. If you, however, want to deploy the app somewhere, you might spend some thoughts on how and where to save the file in order to be able to serve it properly.

library(shiny)
library(leaflet)

ui <- fluidPage(
  actionLink("create", "Create Leaflet")
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observe({
    tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".html", tmpdir = "www")
    leaflet() %>% 
      addTiles() %>% 
      setView(10.01534,53.57532, 10) %>% 
      htmlwidgets::saveWidget(tf)
    browseURL(tf)
  }) %>%
    bindEvent(input$create)
    
}

shinyApp(ui, server)