Shiny: plotOutput height scalling issue

[jangorecki]

I'm currently not able to scale well my plot.
Default height in plotOutput is fixed to 400px while I would expect to have 100% there to keep the aspect ratio of my plot.
Yet I'm not able to provide height="100%", see below:

runApp(list(
  ui =   fluidPage(
    h1("plotOutput - WORKS"),
    plotOutput("Oplot_myplot"),
    h1("plotOutput height=600px - WORKS"),
    plotOutput("Oplot_myplot2", height="600px"),
    h1("plotOutput height=100% - DOESN'T WORK"),
    plotOutput("Oplot_myplot3", height="100%")
  ),
  server = function(input, output, session) {
    output$Oplot_myplot <- renderPlot(plot(1:100))
    output$Oplot_myplot2 <- renderPlot(plot(1:100))
    output$Oplot_myplot3 <- renderPlot(plot(1:100))
  }
))

The plotOutput("x", height="100%") simply doesn't work.

The question is: how can I keep correct aspect ratio in my plot in shiny?

packageVersion("shiny")
[1] ‘0.10.2.1’

[jcheng5]

The height/width in plotOutput correspond with CSS height/width, and height="100%" generally doesn't do what you want it to in HTML/CSS.

You can get the behavior you want by dynamically specifying the height from the R side:

library(shiny)
runApp(list(
  ui = fluidPage(
    plotOutput("plot1", height="auto")
  ),
  server = function(input, output, session) {
    output$plot1 <- renderPlot({
      plot(cars)
    }, height = function() {
      session$clientData$output_plot1_width
    })
  }
))

[jangorecki]

thanks for solution, still the fixed height to 400px is not a good idea IMO.
Regards

[shea-parkes]

This is not well documented anywhere else that I have found. Please consider putting this either in the tutorial, or as an example in plotOutput() and/or renderPlot().

[PoLabs]

Could you please explain that function a bit more? Simply trying to fit a wordcloud to a fluidRow box has been a nightmare.

session$clientData$output_plot1_width

what is session? What is clientData? What is output_plot1_width? I am confused as none of those are in your ui or server code.

[jcheng5]

session is one of the arguments to the server function, you can see it in my code snippet. That code should work if you just replace the "plot1" in output_plot1_width with your plotOutput's actual id.

[sreifenberg]

This already helped a lot, even after more than four years - thank you!

If I get it right, it's only possible to access width and height of outputs, but not UI elements in general, e.g. the height of a wellPanel?

[jcheng5]

@sreifenb That's correct, only outputs have this built-in support for sending their height/width/visibility.

[Rhydderch]

Hi @hadley, your solution works (server side defined height), thank you for that.
However, the tabbox I'm using doesn't scale in height and the plot overflows.

How can I fix this?