How to suppress R Shiny's numericInput instant update? - r

Question

I have the following issue with the behaviour of R shiny's numeric input behaviour. Consider the following snippet:
ui <- basicPage(
numericInput("example","Example",value=0),
verbatimTextOutput("changelog")
)
server <- function(input,output){
output$changelog <- renderPrint(input$example)
}
shinyApp(ui,server)
Suppose that I want to update the example input field to 12345. My issue is that the default event listener would react to every keystroke. Thus the input field would be set to 1, 12,123 and 1234 before I finally get the desired value of 12345. Each numeric input set would be followed by an expensive computation - so this is a very undesirable behaviour.
What I am after is modifying this behaviour so that the event listener only reacts to the numeric input when the user hits enter or leaves the input field. I have currently two approaches to this:
Use a reactiveValue with an update actionButton so that the input is updated only when the user clicks update. I find this an inelegant solution and only shirks the original problem without solving it.
Modify the local shiny.js file directly and remove the keyup.textInputBinding event. That creates another issue with running the shiny app on other computers and it would make this modified behaviour uniform for all numericInput.
I'm wondering if anyone has a solution/suggestion to this? Preferably something that does not involve changing the local shiny.js file. I'm guessing a solution would involve using shinyjs::runjs to manually unsubscribe the keyup.textInputBinding event - but I don't know enough JavaScript to execute it.

Answer 1

You can slow frequent invalidation down with debounce or throttle. In your case, my first guess would be debounce: Debouncing means that invalidation is held off for millis milliseconds.
The reactive expression will only be validated until that time window has passed without a subsequent invalidation which may have an effect like this: ooo-oo-oo---- => -----------o-
In your case:
library(shiny)
ui <- basicPage(
numericInput("example","Example",value=0),
verbatimTextOutput("changelogImmediate"),
verbatimTextOutput("changelog")
)
server <- function(input,output){
exampleInput <- reactive(input$example) %>% debounce(1000)
# debouncedExampleInput <- exampleInput
output$changelogImmediate <- renderPrint(input$example)
output$changelog <- renderPrint(exampleInput())
}
shinyApp(ui,server)