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Trouble with dynamic plotting in ggplot2 when using reactive data in Shiny app

👀 Views: 499 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-10
r shiny ggplot2 R

I'm converting an old project and I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me... I'm trying to implement I've been researching this but I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm not sure how to approach I'm working on a personal project and I'm developing a Shiny app that allows users to select different metrics for plotting. However, I'm running into an scenario where the plot doesn't update as expected when the underlying data changes dynamically. My app uses a reactive expression to manage the data, but ggplot2 seems to be using stale data when I try to update the plot. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```r library(shiny) library(ggplot2) ui <- fluidPage( selectInput('metric', 'Choose a metric:', choices = c('mpg', 'hp', 'wt')), plotOutput('plot') ) server <- function(input, output, session) { data <- reactive({ mtcars[ , input$metric, drop = FALSE] }) output$plot <- renderPlot({ ggplot(data(), aes_string(x = 'row.names(mtcars)', y = input$metric)) + geom_bar(stat = 'identity') }) } shinyApp(ui, server) ``` When I run the app and change the selected metric, the plot does not update correctly. Instead, I see the plot corresponding to the previous selection. The console doesn't throw any errors, and I've tried reactivating the data with `invalidateLater()`, but that didn't help. Am I missing something in the way I'm handling the reactive data? I'm using R version 4.1.0 and ggplot2 version 3.3.5. Any insights into how to properly refresh the plot based on the selected metric would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? Thanks in advance! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks in advance! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Any suggestions would be helpful. Any advice would be much appreciated.