Options for showing detailed instructions?

[joeh]

Hello!

Apologies if this has been asked before, I didn't find this topic with the search feature. I am wondering if anyone can suggest options/best practices for showing heavy text instructions for a Shiny App? The app I'm writing has multiple tabs, with each needing a different explanation for both how to use it, and of the underlying data.

I wanted to avoid having a dedicated instructions tab, to avoid needing to flick between tabs. I guess I could have text placed at the bottom of each page, but this feels a little clunky. My initial thought was to enable a pop-up on button click (one for each tab). I tried shinyalert, but this package seems very much geared towards short messages or input options.

I am decent with R, but I am very much a beginner with Shiny, so I hope this is not a silly question.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[AlexisW]

For this, at one point I used:

explain_text <- "Some longer text"

# ui
actionButton("explain_button",
             label = "",
             icon = icon("question")))

# server
observeEvent(input$explain_button, {
    showModal(modalDialog(
      title = "xxx",
      explain_text,
      easyClose = TRUE
    ))
  })

It was satisfying enough in my case, YMMV