In my blog post on improving the responsiveness of Shiny applications I mentioned a recent project I was involved with as part of a collaboration with Utah Tech University. Part of that project involved the construction of interactive Sankey (or to be extra-precise “alluvial”) diagrams using the d3 JavaScript library. One of the requirements was that the user could hover over a link or node in the diagram and see all the connections to or from that link or node highlighted.
What do we mean by “responsiveness”? Confusingly (and rather unhelpfully) when it comes to web applications there are two different topics that may be referred to by the terms “responsive” or “responsiveness”. If you stick “responsive UI” into your favourite search engine the top results will concern “responsive design” - the practice of making websites and applications work across devices, regardless of device and browser dimensions. That’s an interesting and important topic when it comes to designing data-science applications but it’s not what we’re covering here.
Get the code for this blog on GitHub What is this tutorial and who is it for? This tutorial is aimed mainly at R users who want to learn a bit of D3, and specifically those who are interested in how you can incorporate D3 into your existing workflows in RStudio. It will gloss over a lot of the fundamentals of D3 and related topics (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML) to fast-forward the process of creating your first D3.