r - sliderInput for date

Question

I am making animation using animationOptions in sliderInput(). I want to use date/daterange in a slider, but sliderInput() does not accept date. There was a post in the shiny group. As of March, 2013, there was no solution yet. So I searched around and learned that one can achieve this using JavaScript. Here is the post. Unfortunately, I cannot write in JS. So, I searched around more and came up with this link and wrote the following codes. This works, but the numbers on the slider are confusing. Is this the only way one can move around and use date in sliderInput()? Thank you very much for taking your time.

server.R

library(shiny)

shinyServer(function(input, output, session) {


observe({
    updateDateInput(session, "ana", value = as.Date("2014-07-01") + input$foo)
})

output$preImage <- renderImage({


filename <- normalizePath(file.path('./www',
                          paste(input$ana, '.png', sep='')))

list(src = filename,
     alt = paste("There is no image for ", input$ana, ".", sep = ""))

}, deleteFile = FALSE)

})

ui.R

shinyUI(pageWithSidebar(

    headerPanel("renderImage example"),

sidebarPanel(

    sliderInput("foo", "Animation duration", min = -30,
                max = 30, value = 0, step = 1,
                animate = animationOptions(loop = TRUE, interval = 1000)),

    dateInput("ana", "Choose a date:", value = as.Date("2014-07-01"))

    ),

mainPanel(

# Use imageOutput to place the image on the page
imageOutput("preImage")

    )
))

Answer 1

I don't know when this feature was added, but now date values are automatically recognized in sliderInput(). And some related parameters are timeFormat and step (1-day by default)

sliderInput("date_range", 
"Choose Date Range:", 
min = as.Date("2016-02-01"), max = Sys.Date(), 
value = c(as.Date("2016-02-25"), Sys.Date())
)

Reference: http://shiny.rstudio.com/reference/shiny/latest/sliderInput.html