Upgrade notes for Shiny 1.1.0

This is a significant release for Shiny, with a major new feature that was nearly a year in the making: support for asynchronous operations! Until now, R’s single-threaded nature meant that performing long-running calculations or tasks from Shiny would bring your app to a halt for other users of that process. This release of Shiny deeply integrates the promises package to allow you to execute some tasks asynchronously, including as part of reactive expressions and outputs. See the promises documentation to learn more.

Full changelog

Breaking changes

extractStackTrace and formatStackTrace are deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Shiny. As far as we can tell, nobody has been using these functions, and a refactor has made them vestigial; if you need this functionality, please file an issue.

New features

Support for asynchronous operations! Built-in render functions that expected a certain kind of object to be yielded from their expr, now generally can handle a promise for that kind of object. Reactive expressions and observers are now promise-aware as well. (#1932)
Introduced two changes to the (undocumented but widely used) JavaScript function Shiny.onInputChange(name, value). First, we changed the function name to Shiny.setInputValue (but don’t worry–the old function name will continue to work). Second, until now, all calls to Shiny.onInputChange(inputId, value) have been “deduplicated”; that is, anytime an input is set to the same value it already has, the set is ignored. With Shiny v1.1, you can now add an options object as the third parameter: Shiny.setInputValue("name", value, {priority: "event"}). When the priority option is set to "event", Shiny will always send the value and trigger reactivity, whether it is a duplicate or not. This closes #928, which was the most upvoted open issue by far! Thanks, @daattali. (#2018)

Minor new features and improvements

Addressed #1978: shiny:value is now triggered when duplicate output data is received from the server. (Thanks, @andrewsali! #1999)
If a shiny output contains a css class of shiny-report-size, its container height and width are now reported in session$clientData. So, for an output with an id with "myID", the height/width can be accessed via session$clientData[['output_myID_height']]/session$clientData[['output_myID_width']]. Addresses #1980. (Thanks, @cpsievert! #1981)
Added a new autoclose = TRUE parameter to dateInput() and dateRangeInput(). This closed #1969 which was a duplicate of much older issue, #173. The default value is TRUE since that seems to be the common use case. However, this will cause existing apps with date inputs (that update to this version of Shiny) to have the datepicker be immediately closed once a date is selected. For most apps, this is actually desired behavior; if you wish to keep the datepicker open until the user clicks out of it use autoclose = FALSE. (#1987)
The version of Shiny is now accessible from Javascript, with Shiny.version. There is also a new function for comparing version strings, Shiny.compareVersion(). (#1826, #1830)
Addressed #1851: Stack traces are now smaller in some places do.call() is used. (#1856)
Stack traces have been improved, with more aggressive de-noising and support for deep stack traces (stitching together multiple stack traces that are conceptually part of the same async operation).
Addressed #1859: Server-side selectize is now significantly faster. (Thanks to @dselivanov #1861)
#1989: The server side of outputs can now be removed (e.g. output$plot <- NULL). This is not usually necessary but it does allow some objects to be garbage collected, which might matter if you are dynamically creating and destroying many outputs. (Thanks, @mmuurr! #2011)
Removed the (ridiculously outdated) “experimental feature” tag from the reference documentation for renderUI. (#2036)
Addressed #1907: the ignoreInit argument was first added only to observeEvent. Later, we also added it to eventReactive, but forgot to update the documentation. Now done, thanks @flo12392! (#2036)

Bug fixes

Fixed #1006: Slider inputs sometimes showed too many digits. (#1956)
Fixed #1958: Slider inputs previously displayed commas after a decimal point. (#1960)
The internal URLdecode() function previously was a copy of httpuv::decodeURIComponent(), assigned at build time; now it invokes the httpuv function at run time.
Fixed #1840: with the release of Shiny 1.0.5, we accidently changed the relative positioning of the icon and the title text in navbarMenus and tabPanels. This fix reverts this behavior back (i.e. the icon should be to the left of the text and/or the downward arrow in case of navbarMenus). (#1848)
Fixed #1600: URL-encoded bookmarking did not work with sliders that had dates or date-times. (#1961)
Fixed #1962: File dragging and dropping broke in the presence of jQuery version 3.0 as introduced by the rhandsontable htmlwidget. (#2005)
Improved the error handling inside the addResourcePath() function, to give end users more informative error messages when the directoryPath argument cannot be normalized. This is especially useful for runtime: shiny_prerendered Rmd documents, like learnr tutorials. (#1968)
Changed script tags in reactlog (inst/www/reactive-graph.html) from HTTP to HTTPS in order to avoid mixed content blocking by most browsers. (Thanks, @jekriske-lilly! #1844)
Addressed #1784: runApp() will avoid port 6697, which is considered unsafe by Chrome.
Fixed #2000: Implicit calls to xxxOutput not working inside modules. (Thanks, @GregorDeCillia! #2010)
Fixed #2021: Memory leak with reactiveTimer and invalidateLater. (#2022)

Library updates