Cookie with checkboxes

[Estateira]

Hello,

following the MWE on the ReadMe page on github, I created a minimal shiny app with one slider and one checkbox, whereby in both
cases cookies are set and retrieved via observeEvent, the problem is that after I reload the app everything works fine for the sliderInput but for the checkbox the value is constantly set to TRUE after reload, even though I do not click it.

library(cookies)
library(shiny)

ui <- add_cookie_handlers(
fluidPage(
titlePanel("A Simple App"),
fluidRow(
sliderInput(
"number_selector",
label = paste(
"Select a number.",
"This selector sets the cookie value.",
"It also initializes with the cookie value.",
"Refresh to see it remembered.",
sep = "\n"
),
min = 1,
max = 10,
value = 1
), checkboxInput("check", "Checkbox", value = FALSE))))

server <- function(input, output, session) {
observeEvent(
input$number_selector,
{
set_cookie(
cookie_name = "selected_number",
cookie_value = input$number_selector ) } )

observeEvent(
get_cookie("selected_number"),
updateSliderInput(
inputId = "number_selector",
value = get_cookie("selected_number")
),
once = TRUE )

observeEvent(
input$check,
{
set_cookie(
cookie_name = "check_cookie",
cookie_value = input$check ) })

observeEvent(
get_cookie("check_cookie"),
updateSliderInput(
inputId = "check",
value = get_cookie("check_cookie")
),
once = TRUE)}

shinyApp(ui, server, options = list( launch.browser = TRUE ))

[jonthegeek]

@Estateira Thank you for this report! I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to you; I managed to lose this report in my inbox, and finally got to it today!

There are two issues here:

1. You have a typo in your observeEvent(get_cookie("check_cookie"), ...). You copy/pasted updateSliderInput, and need updateCheckboxInput().
2. More importantly, cookies are text. The values of the checkbox are saved as "true" and "false". I'm trying to decide whether I should handle that inside the package, or just make it more explicit in help. Either way it's something for me to sort out! I think I'll probably save more than just the value in the cookie, and coerce the value back to its original class when it comes back, but I need to think about whether it's worth that effort vs telling users how to deal with it themselves. See Cookie with checkboxes #81.

In any case, thank you for bringing this to my attention!

This is a working version of your app:

library(cookies)
library(shiny)

ui <- add_cookie_handlers(
  fluidPage(
    titlePanel("A Simple App"),
    fluidRow(
      sliderInput(
        "number_selector",
        label = paste(
          "Select a number.",
          "This selector sets the cookie value.",
          "It also initializes with the cookie value.",
          "Refresh to see it remembered.",
          sep = "\n"
        ),
        min = 1,
        max = 10,
        value = 1
      ),
      checkboxInput("check", "Checkbox", value = FALSE)
    )
  )
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observeEvent(
    input$number_selector,
    {
      set_cookie(
        cookie_name = "selected_number",
        cookie_value = input$number_selector
      ) 
    }
  )
  
  observeEvent(
    get_cookie("selected_number"),
    updateSliderInput(
      inputId = "number_selector",
      value = get_cookie("selected_number")
    ),
    once = TRUE
  )
  
  observeEvent(
    input$check,
    {
      set_cookie(
        cookie_name = "check_cookie",
        cookie_value = input$check
      ) 
    }
  )
  
  observeEvent(
    get_cookie("check_cookie"),
    updateCheckboxInput(
      inputId = "check",
      value = as.logical(get_cookie("check_cookie"))
    ),
    once = TRUE
  )
}

shinyApp(ui, server, options = list( launch.browser = TRUE ))

BTW, if you don't already have something similar, I find the Cookie-Editor Chrome extension extremely helpful when working on things that involve cookies! It took me a while to sort out what was happening in this case, but seeing "true" and "false" instead of TRUE and FALSE eventually got through to me!