R shiny different output between renderTable and renderDataTable

Question

I have a shiny application that shows a nice html table of my data, using renderDataTable. Then I wanted to make some basic statistics, subset data and calculate means and some other data.

When showing results with renderTable, I found that date column was not shown in date format. In the figure ou can see the difference. Both tables are generated from the same dataset in the same shiny web app. Can you explain what's happening?

And here you can see ui.R and server.R. In this script I just want to show a table and was surprised by the different output.

ui.R

library(shiny)

# Estructura de la página (paneles)
shinyUI(pageWithSidebar(
  # Título superior
  headerPanel(""),
  # Panel lateral izquierdo - selección de datos
  sidebarPanel(
    helpText("Selecciona las fechas y el tipo de datos.
             Pulsa el botón Actualizar."),    
    selectInput("torre", "Torre:",
                list("Agres" = "mariola",
                     "Alfàs del Pi" = "shelada",
                     "Altura" = "altura",                                          
                     "Vistabella del Maestrat" = "vistabella",
                     "Xàtiva" = "xativa")),       
    selectInput("tipo", "Intervalo de datos",
                list("Diezminutales" = "-datos-10m.csv",
                     "Diarios" = "-datos-diarios.csv",
                     "Mensuales" = "-datos-mensuales.csv")),
    dateInput('date1',
              label = 'Fecha inicial',
              value = Sys.Date()),
    dateInput('date2',
              label = 'Fecha final.',
              value = Sys.Date()),
    submitButton("Actualizar"),
    helpText("
             Descarga de datos tabulados en formato CSV."),
    downloadButton('downloadData','Descargar datos')    
  ),

  # Panel principal (presentación de gráficas)
  mainPanel(
    tabsetPanel(
      tabPanel("Inicio",
               h3("Consulta de datos"),
               p(HTML("Some info.")),
               tableOutput("view")
               ),
      tabPanel("Ayuda", htmlOutput("ayuda"),id="ayuda"),
      tabPanel('Tabla de datos', dataTableOutput("table1")),      
      tabPanel('Medias', tableOutput("table2"))
    )
  )
))

and server.R

library(shiny)
library(plyr)
library(lubridate)
library(scales)

options(shiny.transcode.json = FALSE)

# Funciones
shinyServer(function(input,output){

  filename=reactive({
    paste0(input$torre,input$tipo)
    })
  day1=reactive({
    as.POSIXct(input$date1)
  })
  day2=reactive({
    as.POSIXct(input$date2)    
  })

  # Ayuda
  introFile <- './ayuda.txt'
  ayuda <- readChar(introFile, file.info(introFile)$size)
  output$ayuda <- renderText({HTML(ayuda)})

  datos2=reactive({
    fn = filename()
    f = read.csv(fn,header=T, sep=",",na.strings="-99.9")
    f$date = as.Date(f$date)
    f
  })
  datos=reactive({
    d1 <- as.Date(day1())
    d2 <- as.Date(day2())
    datos2a = datos2()
    with( datos2a , datos2a[ date >= d1 & date <= d2, ] )
  })  

  #  Tabla de datos
  output$table1 = renderDataTable({
    datos()
  }, options = list(aLengthMenu = c(12, 20, 40), iDisplayLength = 12))

  output$table2 = renderTable({
    datos()
  })

  output$downloadData <- downloadHandler(
    file = c('data.csv'),
    content = function(file) {
      write.csv(datos(), file)
    }
  )

})

Thanks in advance for your help

Answer 1

There is no reason to have the same output from 2 different functions.

• rendertable uses xtable to create the html table
• renderDataTable uses external javascript library

You can get the same date format, you should just format your date before calling renderTable. Here a short complete example.

library(shiny)
dat <- data.frame(date=seq.Date(Sys.Date(),by=1,length.out=5),
                  temp = runif(5))

ui <- fluidPage(
    fluidRow(column(4,dataTableOutput('dto')),
             column(4,tableOutput('to')))
  )

server <- function(input,output){

  output$dto <- renderDataTable({dat})
  dat$date <- format(dat$date,'%Y-%m-%d')
  output$to <- renderTable(dat)

}

runApp(list(ui=ui,server=server))