r - How to trigger a data refresh in shiny?

Question

I have a shiny application that queries data from SQL into data frames, and then those data frames are referenced from my shinyServer() block. I've been running it only in RStudio thus far, and so whenever I needed new data I'd just restart the application and before the server loads it would grab all new data.

I'd like to transition the app to shiny server, but I'm not sure how I can induce it to get new data periodically. For the sake of the interface I'd like it to be automatic rather than have a user click a button to initiate the loading. Is there an idiomatic solution for this?

EDIT:

I think I found a solution that works for me.

shinyServer(function(input,output,session){
    sourceData <- reactive({
        invalidateLater(1000000,session)

        functionThatGetsData()
    })
})

Answer 1

The smartest would probable be to use reactivePoll if you can make a fast query to detect if there is new data. This worked very well for me just today actually.

reactivePoll shiny

Reactive polling

Description

Used to create a reactive data source, which works by periodically polling a non-reactive data ource.

Usage

reactivePoll(intervalMillis, session, checkFunc, valueFunc)

Arguments

intervalMillis

Approximate number of milliseconds to wait between calls to checkFunc. his an be either a numeric value, or a function that returns a numeric value.

session

The user session to associate this file reader with, or NULL if none. If non-null, he reader will automatically stop when the session ends.

checkFunc A relatively cheap function whose values over time will be tested for equality; nequality indicates that the underlying value has changed and needs to be invalidated and re-ead using valueFunc. See Details. valueFunc

A function that calculates the underlying value. See Details.