teal is a shiny-based interactive
exploration framework for analyzing data, with particular emphasis on
CDISC clinical trial data. teal applications allow their
users to:
In addition, the teal framework provides application
developers with:
More advanced users of the framework can also create new analysis
modules which can be added into any teal applications.
teal application:This simple teal application takes the iris
and mtcars datasets and displays their contents:
library(teal)
app <- init(
data = teal_data(IRIS = iris, MTCARS = mtcars),
modules = modules(
example_module("Module 1"),
example_module("Module 2")
),
filter = teal_slices(
teal_slice(dataname = "IRIS", varname = "Species", selected = "setosa")
)
) |>
modify_title("My first teal application") |>
modify_header(h3("My first teal application")) |>
modify_footer(tags$div(a("Powered by teal", href = "https://insightsengineering.github.io/teal/latest-tag/")))
if (interactive()) {
shinyApp(app$ui, app$server)
}Hovering the image shows the teal application
generated by this code.
Every teal application is composed of the following
elements, all of which can be controlled by the app developer by passing
arguments to the init function:
teal modules.
Species variable in the iris
dataset.shinyliveThe key function to use to create your teal application
is init, which requires two mandatory arguments:
data and modules. There are other optional
arguments for init, which can be used to customize the
application. Please refer to the documentation for init for
further details.
The data argument in the init function
specifies the data used in your application. All datasets which are
about to be used in teal application must be passed through
teal_data object. It is also possible to specify
relationships between the datasets using the join_keys
argument but in this case the datasets are not related. See this vignette for
details. If data is not available and has to be pulled from a remote
source, init must receive a teal_data_module
that specifies how to obtain the desired datasets and put them into a
teal_data object. See this vignette for details.
In order to use CDISC clinical trial data in a teal
application the cdisc_data function is used instead. Custom
SDTM standards can be handled with teal_data
and join_keys.
For further details, we recommend exploring the teal.data
package documentation.
The modules argument to init consists of a
list of teal modules (which can be wrapped together using
the function modules). Core teal developers
have created several universal teal modules that can be
useful in any teal application. To learn how to create your
own modules, please explore Creating Custom Modules
vignette. To use our predefined modules, see the references below
for links to these modules.
The optional filter argument in init allows
you to initialize the application with predefined filters. For further
details see Filter Panel vignette.
If any of the modules in your teal
application support reporting (see teal.reporter
for more details), users of your application can add the outputs of the
modules to a report. This report can then be downloaded and a special
Report Previewer module will be added to your application as an
additional tab, where users can view and configure their reports before
downloading them. See more details in this vignette.
teal hands over data with reproducible code to every
module included in the application. Note that teal does not
display the code, that is the modules’ responsibility. For example, the
example_module function used above shows the code in the
main panel together with other outputs. For more details see this vignette.
Advanced shiny users can include teal application in
their shiny application. For further details see teal as a module.
To learn more about the teal framework we recommend
first exploring some of the available analysis modules.
For example see:
MultiAssayExperiment objectsFor a demo of teal apps see:
The teal framework relies on a set of supporting
packages whose documentation provides more in-depth information. The
packages which are of most interest when defining
tealapplications are:
teal.data:
defining data for teal application.teal.slice:
defining data filtering before passing into teal
modules.