Formatting selectInput() to show character dates to the user - r

Question

I am currently building a shiny app and trying to get a set of dates to render as character strings to the end user, while still keeping their date format when invoked in the server side code.
There might be a simple solution here, but unsure how to get the dates to format in the selectInput dropdown. In my actual use case, using a date slider isn't ideal as the dates do not follow a common interval.
Reproducible example below:
# setup
require(lubridate)
test.dates <- as.Date(c('2014-06-01', '2014-07-01', '2014-08-01',
'2014-09-01', '2014-10-01', '2014-11-01',
'2014-12-01', '2015-01-01','2015-02-01',
'2015-03-01', '2015-04-01'))
test.names <- as.character(paste0(month(test.dates, label = T), ' ',
year(test.dates)))
test.df <- data.frame(date = test.dates)
row.names(test.df) <- test.names
# shiny
server <- function(input, output) {
output$table <- renderTable(test.df)
}
ui <- fluidPage(
sidebarLayout(
sidebarPanel(
selectInput("test", label = "DATE FORMAT TEST:", choices =
test.df, selected = test.df[1,])
),
mainPanel(tableOutput('table'))
)
)
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Answer 1

I believe you will find it much easier to pass around character objects than date objects in Shiny. I would simply use the direct character values of your dates and whenever you need them to be date objects in your subsequent analysis explicitly convert to a date object. The following provides an example where both the dropdown and table have the character formatted dates.
require(lubridate)
myDates <- c('2014-06-01', '2014-07-01', '2014-08-01',
'2014-09-01', '2014-10-01', '2014-11-01',
'2014-12-01', '2015-01-01','2015-02-01',
'2015-03-01', '2015-04-01')
test.names <- as.character(paste0(lubridate::month(test.dates, label=TRUE), ' ',
year(test.dates)))
test.df <- data.frame(date = myDates)
row.names(test.df) <- test.names
# shiny
server <- function(input, output) {
output$table <- renderTable(test.df)
}
ui <- fluidPage(
sidebarLayout(
sidebarPanel(
selectInput("test", label = "DATE FORMAT TEST:", choices =
myDates, selected = myDates[1])
),
mainPanel(tableOutput('table'))
)
)
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)