shiny: start the app with hidden tabs, with NO delay

I would like to build an application and some of the tabs will be hidden to the user until he types the right password. I know how to do this with shinyjs::hideTab:

library(shiny);library(shinyjs)
ui <- fluidPage(useShinyjs(),
  navbarPage("hello", id="hello",
             tabPanel("home", br(), h3("this is home"),passwordInput("pass", "enter 'password' to see the tabs: "),actionButton("enter", "enter")),
             tabPanel("tab2", br(), h4("this is tab2")),
             tabPanel("tab3 with a lot of stuff in it", br(), h4("this is tab3"))))
server <- function(input, output, session) {
  hideTab("hello", "tab2"); hideTab("hello", "tab3 with a lot of stuff in it")
  observeEvent(input$enter, {
    if (input$pass == "password"){showTab("hello", "tab2"); showTab("hello", "tab3 with a lot of stuff in it")}})}
shinyApp(ui, server)

However there is a little “thing”. In my application, the hidden tabs have a lot of stuff, like widgets, uiOutputs, plots, images, file reading in global.R, etc. The consequence is that the loading time is higher and during this loading time of the application (before the hideTab instruction gets run) the user actually sees the hidden tab and can even click on them and see what’s inside. They stay “visible” for like 1 second and then get hidden.

Is there a way to make them immediately hidden, before the UI gets built? I’d prefer a solution without having to put all my ui code into the server.R script…

Thanks

Answer

You could use javascript with extendShinyjs() to hide the tabs you want on page load:

Javascript code:

shinyjs.init = function(){
  $('#hello li a[data-value="tab3_val"]').hide();
  $('#hello li a[data-value="tab2_val"]').hide();
}

R code:

ui <- fluidPage(useShinyjs(),
                #Added this js
                extendShinyjs(script = path_to_javascript_file),
                navbarPage("hello", id="hello",
                           tabPanel("home", br(), h3("this is home"),passwordInput("pass", "enter 'password' to see the tabs: "),actionButton("enter", "enter")),
                           tabPanel("tab2", value = "tab2_val", br(), h4("this is tab2")),
                           tabPanel("tab3 with a lot of stuff in it", value = "tab3_val", br(), h4("this is tab3"))))

server <- function(input, output, session) {

  observeEvent(input$enter, {
    if (input$pass == "password"){
      show(selector = '#hello li a[data-value="tab3_val"]')
      show(selector = '#hello li a[data-value="tab2_val"]')
      }})}
shinyApp(ui, server)

---

Alternatively the CSS actually isn’t too complicated. If you wanted to go that route you could simply replace the extendShinyjs() call in the above with:

tags$head(tags$style(HTML("#hello li a[data-value = 'tab2_val'], #hello li a[data-value = 'tab3_val'] {
                             display: none;
 }")))

The downside to this is that the formatting of the tabs appears to be off after un-hiding them.