Buttons be buggy

[sckott]

So we've hit a wall with buttons. That is, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Things tried that do not seem to work:

• If fileInput is a problem b/c they can not easily be reset: Rendering fileInput in the server with renderUI, then displaying fileInput with uiOutput. Via this SO thread. Main reason is that really this approach only "resets the form", meaning the UI is reset, but underneath the input$ vars still have the data in them

example code that didn't work

# ui
uiOutput("wdlFile_ui")

# server
output$wdlFile_ui <- renderUI({
    input$resetSubmission
    fileInput(
      inputId = "wdlFile",
      label = "Upload WDL (required):",
      accept = ".wdl"
    )
  })

• shinyjs::reset is currently in the app, being used behind the Reset button. I thought it was working, but perhaps not. It has known problems, see daattali/shinyjs#104 - AFAICT it works the first time, then doesn't work to reset after that (e.g., hit Reset then upload more files, hit Reset again, and then Submit or Validate and it still runs, meaning the data was not cleared in the background)

• use observeEvent instead of eventReactive? the buttons we're having problem with are currently handled by eventReactive, which is perhaps the wrong approach. It seems like observeEvent may be better for "side effects", which is what we're doing - that is, making an http request to a server - but we are returning something from the http request, so it's not just side effects 🤷🏽 . I did try this but it seemed like it caused problems, e.g., the block would run on uploading a file, not just on button click

• what might work is using isolate - tried with eventReactive and it didn't change the unwanted behavior. However, isolate with observeEvent does seem to work 🎉 (i think 🤞🏽 )

  • use of observeEvent introduces however safeError crashing the app instead of simply throwing the error as a messasge in the UI. no solution for this yet, actively asking about this ...
    • appears that we can fix this with use of reactiveValues doing some handling of the file inputs, pushing soon