Ashley Baldry blog posts https://ashbaldry.github.io/ I have been working on a project where we have been unable to use {shinytest2}, and therefore have had a heavy reliance on the testServer function on testing the reactive functionality in each of the modules. Whilst it is great for checking the server-side logic based on dummy inputs being... Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2025-08-10-shinytesters-0-1-0-release/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2025-08-10-shinytesters-0-1-0-release/ With the upcoming release of {designer}, one of the key features is the ability to save and share templates; by including it as part of the application, this removes the need to bookmark specific IDs, and makes it easier to use and maintain multiple wireframes. Instead of using the bookmark... Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2023-08-20-designer-0-3-0-release/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2023-08-20-designer-0-3-0-release/ I’m really happy to announce an update of {designer} is available on CRAN! This is the first package that I’ve created that has warranted such an update, and the features included will help improve the experience of using the package. What is {designer}? When coming to write about this release,... Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-11-21-designer-0-2-0-release/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-11-21-designer-0-2-0-release/ Shiny has always been the framework for creating dashboards in R, but as time goes on the potential use cases for shiny applications are continuously increasing. One area that I wanted to explore was the inclusion of multimedia. This might be an introductory video, or embedding one of those racing... Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-07-20-shiny-multimedia/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-07-20-shiny-multimedia/ A couple of weeks ago I was looking around for different CSS frameworks to play around with, and came across Semantic HTML (not to be confused with Semantic UI) and I’m hooked! There are several “classless CSS frameworks” that are implemented under the ideology of Semantic HTML: styling of elements... Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-05-17-semantic-html/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-05-17-semantic-html/ When writing R scripts that involve connecting to a database, it is relatively simple to set up the connection at the start of the script (dbConnect), do all of the required queries (dbGetQuery, dbWriteTable etc.) and then at the end of the script close the connection (dbDisconnect) without much of... Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-03-17-reg-finalizer/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2022-03-17-reg-finalizer/ A month or so ago, over 700 R package maintainers were e-mailed about the potential removal of the {lubridate} package due to a test failing on MacOS systems. This is a chunk of the 1000+ lines email that about 900+ #rstats package maintainers received due to the impending archival of... Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-11-25-depcheck-r-dependency-checker/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-11-25-depcheck-r-dependency-checker/ There are several ways to send notifications with R when a scheduled job/process has completed running, but if it errors during that process then we still want to have a notification that the script has been unsuccessful. Normally a scheduled job is set-up by using Rscript. If a script is... Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-08-09-rscript-error-notification/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-08-09-rscript-error-notification/ Have you ever experienced a call where it starts with “let me show you something” and you both end up looking at the loading shiny app for the next 5 minutes? This is the source of inspiration to create the {shinytitle} package (Well, this and CDKeys guilting me into returning... Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-06-17-shinytitle-0-1-0-release/ https://ashbaldry.github.io/2021-06-17-shinytitle-0-1-0-release/