In Shiny, the submit button isn't running - r

Question

I wrote a R script (MAIN.R) that converts PDF tables to CSV. When I run MAIN.R as an individual file, it functions well. I've tried it many times.
Currently, I'm working on a R shiny app that uses "MAIN.R" as a source and takes a pdf file as input. When I push the submit button, the output should appear in the MAIN panel. Unfortunately, the submit button does not function as intended.
May anyone please assist me with this, as I am new to Shiny?
UI.R
shinyUI(fluidPage(
titlePanel("DATASET CONVERSION"),
sidebarLayout(
fileInput("filein", label = h2("Select a file to convert.")),
submitButton("Submit")
),
mainPanel(
tableOutput("Dataset")
)
)
)
Server.R
source("MAIN.R")
shinyServer(function(input, output) {
outputdf <- reactive({ input$filein
})
output$Dataset <- renderTable({
outputdf()
})
})

Answer 1

Your Submit button is not currently linked to anything, so it will not do anything. If I am reading the code right, you are just taking the input dataset and storing it as the output of outputdf. Your output$Dataset then just picks up that outputdf and displays it as-is, without any work being done on it.
You use an action button like so:
## In UI.R
actionButton("execute", "Execute the Main Function")
## In Server.R
observeEvent(input$execute, {
## Do stuff here
})
Note that the actionButton has two parameters, inputID (which is how you refer to it) and text to display on top. For example, with input$filein, 'filein' is the inputID.
In Server.R, observeEvent won't do anything until it detects a change in input$execute, which happens when someone clicks the button. That is where you put your code to do stuff.
Now, in output$Dataset, you need to access the results of whatever you did in that observeEvent. One way to do that is to use a reactiveValue. This is just like a reactive, but instead of a function, it stores a data element. Initialize it as an empty dataframe, and then update it in the observeEvent. Something like this:
## In Server.R
treated_output <- reactiveValue(data.frame())
observeEvent(input$execute, {
## Run the function on the file
updated <- main_function(input$filein)
# Update your reactiveValue
treated_output(updated)
})
output$Dataset <- renderTable({
treated_output()
})
Does this make sense?