shinydashboardPlusGallery() example does not work

Question

I have installed the R package shinydashboardPlus following the instructions on the official GitHub page in the Demo Section: https://github.com/RinteRface/shinydashboardPlus

As instructed I installed and loaded the package as well as the package dependencies. Then tried to run the demo dashboard of shinydashboardPlus using the command >shinydashboardPlusGallery() in R Studio which failed and gave me errors.

I then went above and beyond and installed and loaded several of the packages just to be sure but it still does not work.

Below is my code:

install.packages("pacman")
# List all the packages to be used below.
pacman::p_load(shiny, shinydashboard, shinydashboardPlus, styler, shinyAce, shinyWidgets, shinyjqui, shinyEffects)

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
library(shinydashboardPlus)
shinydashboardPlusGallery()

The error I received is as follows:

> shinydashboardPlusGallery()
This Font Awesome icon ('fa fa-angle-down') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('gears') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('gears') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
This Font Awesome icon ('clock-o') does not exist:
* if providing a custom `html_dependency` these `name` checks can 
  be deactivated with `verify_fa = FALSE`
Error in dashboardPage(md = FALSE, dashboardHeader(fixed = TRUE, title = tagList(span(class = "logo-lg",  : 
  unused arguments (md = FALSE, controlbar = dashboardControlbar(skin = "dark", controlbarMenu(controlbarItem(title = "Tab 1", icon = icon("desktop"), active = TRUE, sliderInput(inputId = "inputsidebar1", label = "Number of observations:", min = 0, max = 1000, value = 500)), controlbarItem(icon = icon("paint-brush"), title = "Tab 2", numericInput(inputId = "inputsidebar2", label = "Observations:", value = 10, min = 1, max = 100)))), footer = dashboardFooter(left = "By Divad Nojnarg", right = "Zurich, 2019"))

I am using a Windows 11 OS. My R and R Studio version are as follows:

R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt) -- "Vigorous Calisthenics"
Copyright (C) 2022 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

RStudio 2022.02.3+492 "Prairie Trillium" Release (1db809b8323ba0a87c148d16eb84efe39a8e7785, 2022-05-20) for Windows
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/5.12.8 Chrome/69.0.3497.128 Safari/537.36

I would really like to use the shinydashboardPlus package for building my dashboards but can't seem to get started with it.

Answer 1

I've encountered the same issue while trying to access the library's demo gallery. This is clearly a problem of namespaces between the shinydashboard and shinydashboardPlus packages. If you execute the following line search():

> search()
 [1] ".GlobalEnv"                 "package:shinyEffects"       "package:styler"            
 [4] "package:shinyAce"           "package:shinyWidgets"       "package:shinydashboard"    
 [7] "package:shinyjqui"          "package:shiny"              "package:shinydashboardPlus"
[10] "tools:rstudio"              "package:stats"              "package:graphics"          
[13] "package:grDevices"          "package:utils"              "package:datasets"          
[16] "package:methods"            "Autoloads"                  "org:r-lib"                 
[19] "package:base" 

As you can see, in my case the shinydashboard package is placed before the shinydashboardPlus package, so in consequence the dashboardPage function that is being used is the one that belongs to the shinydashboard package instead of the shinydashboardPlus package.

This is a bug, and my quick solution is:

• Find where the demo app is located, you should find it in a route similar to ~\Documents\R\R-4.1.2\library\shinydashboardPlus\examples.
• Open the global.R file.
• You have to change the order to assure that shinydashboardPlus package is called after shinydashboard package.

For instance:

# Load packages
library(shiny)
library(shinyjqui)
library(shinyWidgets)
library(shinyAce)
library(styler)
library(shinyEffects)
library(shinydashboard)
library(shinydashboardPlus)

Answer 2

Similar to the other answer, I solved it with:

library(shinydashboard)
library(shinydashboardPlus)
shinydashboardPlusGallery()