Interactive Documents

An interactive document is a file that contains widgets and outputs. After writing a report, you can launch it as an app with the click of a button.

Voilà

By default, Connect renders Jupyter Notebook files into HTML documents. If your notebook includes interactive widgets (ipywidgets), deploy using Voilà mode to present the notebook interactively using Voilà.

Interactive mode runs the notebook each time a user visits it, and maintains a live Jupyter kernel so that the user can interact with your code via interactive widgets.

You can run your notebook locally using Voilà from the command line (voila notebook.ipynb) or via the Voilà extension for Jupyter. Running your notebook locally is helpful to identify issues before deploying.

Note

While Connect supports Voilà content, other frameworks built off of Voilà may not work with Connect.

Shiny R Markdown

You can use Shiny widgets and outputs in R Markdown to create interactive documents. Embed Shiny components in R Markdown files to create interactive reports or slideshows. The resulting report is a complete Shiny app.

Reactive output can also be included in your documents by using render* functions. R Markdown includes the rendered output in the result of the code chunk. The output then behaves like rendered output in a standard Shiny app, and automatically updates whenever you change a widget value or reactive expression that it depends on.

For more information on creating interactive documents using Shiny, see the Interactive Docs Shiny article.