Shiny selectInput/pickerInput with long names should overflow sidebar

Question

I want to built a shiny app with bs4Dash in sidebar layout. The sidebar contains a dropdown selection menu with items that have long names. Once I open the dropdown, I would like the full item name to be visible, i.e. overflowing the dashboard's body. The names are cut at the sidebar border by default (shiny::selectizeInput) or the dropdown content is right-aligned to the sidebar border and the start of the item name is off-screen to the left (shinyWidgets::pickerInput).

This is how the app looks (updated 2022-12-16):

I tried to apply the solution for a flexdashboard described here, but could not get it working.

Thanks for your help!

Here is a reproducible example of my app:

# app.R
library(shiny)
library(bs4Dash)
library(shinyWidgets)

vec_long_items <- sapply(1:10, function(i) {
  paste("START", paste(sample(letters, 100, replace = TRUE), collapse = ""))
})

shinyApp(
  ui = dashboardPage(
    header = bs4DashNavbar(
      title = "Long items to select", disable = TRUE, controlbarIcon = NULL
    ),
    sidebar = bs4DashSidebar(
      skin = "white",
      shinyWidgets::pickerInput(
        inputId = "in1", label = "shinyWidgets::pickerInput", choices = vec_long_items
      ),
      shiny::selectInput(
        inputId = "in2", label = "shiny::selectInput", choices = vec_long_items
      )
    ),
    body = dashboardBody(tableOutput("out_text"))
  ),
  server = function(input, output, session) {
    output$out_text <- renderTable(data.frame(items = vec_long_items))
  },
  options = list(launch.browser = FALSE)
)

My sessionInfo():

R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)  
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Switzerland.1252  LC_CTYPE=German_Switzerland.1252    LC_MONETARY=German_Switzerland.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                        LC_TIME=German_Switzerland.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] bs4Dash_2.1.0 shiny_1.7.2

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.7         shinyWidgets_0.7.5 digest_0.6.29      later_1.3.0        mime_0.12          R6_2.5.1           lifecycle_1.0.2    xtable_1.8-4       jsonlite_1.8.0     magrittr_2.0.3
[11] cachem_1.0.6       rlang_1.0.5        cli_3.4.0          fontawesome_0.3.0  promises_1.2.0.1   jquerylib_0.1.4    bslib_0.4.0        ellipsis_0.3.2     tools_4.1.0        httpuv_1.6.5
[21] fastmap_1.1.0      compiler_4.1.0     memoise_2.0.1      htmltools_0.5.2    sass_0.4.2

Answer 1

Try this css:

css <- ".main-sidebar, .main-sidebar .sidebar .os-viewport, .os-host-overflow, .os-host-overflow>.os-padding {overflow: visible !important;}"

i.e.

    body = dashboardBody(
      tags$head(
        tags$style(HTML(css))
      ),

and

      shinyWidgets::pickerInput(
        inputId = "in1", label = "shinyWidgets::pickerInput", choices = vec_long_items, 
        options = pickerOptions(dropdownAlignRight = TRUE)
      ),

Answer 2

I found a CSS property for pickerInput that improves the output. Change the body as follows:

# ...
body = dashboardBody(
      tags$head(
        tags$style(HTML("
        .dropdown-menu.show {
          display: contents;
        }
      "))
      ),
      tableOutput("out_text")
    )
# ...

Now there is a scrollbar to look at the complete element. Not what I wanted but already better.

I am still looking for an "overflow-solution" :-)