Highlight in plotly figure breaks in shiny app when fixed group argument is used in SharedData$new()

[LDSamson]

The Highlight in a plotly figure breaks when fixed group argument is used in SharedData$new(). I think it is a crosstalk and not a plotly issue, but please correct me if I am wrong.

This only happens when filtering the dataset in Shiny, dynamically selecting between two (or more) groups to show. It only happens when in the plotly figure a factor is used, of which the levels are different between the (dynamically selected) groups . In my examples this is the variable col_group, see below:

library(shiny)
library(plotly)
library(dplyr)
library(crosstalk)

example_data <- data.frame(
  id         = unlist(lapply(1:25, rep, times = 4)),
  item       = rep(c("item1", "item2"), times = 50),
  xvalue     = rnorm(100),
  yvalue     = rnorm(100)
) %>% 
  mutate(
    col_group = round(runif(100, 1,5), digits = 0),
    col_group = ifelse(item == "item2" & col_group %in% 4:5, 1, col_group),
    col_group = factor(col_group)
  )

plotly_figure <- function(data, group = "group1"){
  SharedData$new(data, ~id, group = group) %>% 
    plot_ly(x = ~xvalue, y = ~yvalue, 
            color = ~col_group, text = ~id, 
            type = "scatter", mode = "markers")
}

ui <- fluidPage(
  selectInput(
    inputId = "selection", 
    label = "select item",
    choices = unique(example_data$item)
  ),
  plotlyOutput("figure")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  data_reactive <- reactive(filter(example_data, item == input$selection))
  output$figure <- renderPlotly(plotly_figure(data_reactive()))
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Expectation: When clicking on a point, I expect that all points with the same ID are highlighted

What happens Only when item1 is selected, the behaviour is as expected. When item2 is selected, nothing happens after a click.

solutions/workarounds

The problem does not occur :

• when using bscols() with the two figues outside shiny
• when removing the group argument (but I need it for a more complex app configuration)
• when we choose a different group name every time a different input is chosen, by adding this to the server:

dynamicgroup <- reactiveVal("grouped")
observeEvent(input$selection, {
    dynamicgroup(crosstalk:::createUniqueId(4))
  })
  output$figure <- renderPlotly(plotly_figure(data_reactive(), dynamicgroup()))

session info:

R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.utf8  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                           
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.utf8    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] crosstalk_1.2.0 dplyr_1.0.10    plotly_4.10.0   ggplot2_3.3.6   shiny_1.7.2    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] tidyselect_1.1.2   xfun_0.33          bslib_0.4.0        purrr_0.3.4       
 [5] colorspace_2.0-3   vctrs_0.4.1        generics_0.1.3     htmltools_0.5.3   
 [9] viridisLite_0.4.1  yaml_2.3.5         utf8_1.2.2         rlang_1.0.6       
[13] later_1.3.0        pillar_1.8.1       jquerylib_0.1.4    glue_1.6.2        
[17] withr_2.5.0        RColorBrewer_1.1-3 lifecycle_1.0.2    stringr_1.4.1     
[21] munsell_0.5.0      gtable_0.3.1       htmlwidgets_1.5.4  evaluate_0.16     
[25] memoise_2.0.1      labeling_0.4.2     knitr_1.40         fastmap_1.1.0     
[29] httpuv_1.6.6       fansi_1.0.3        highr_0.9          Rcpp_1.0.9        
[33] xtable_1.8-4       promises_1.2.0.1   scales_1.2.1       cachem_1.0.6      
[37] jsonlite_1.8.0     farver_2.1.1       mime_0.12          digest_0.6.29     
[41] stringi_1.7.8      grid_4.2.1         cli_3.4.1          tools_4.2.1       
[45] magrittr_2.0.3     sass_0.4.2         lazyeval_0.2.2     tibble_3.1.8      
[49] crayon_1.5.2       tidyr_1.2.1        pkgconfig_2.0.3    ellipsis_0.3.2    
[53] rsconnect_0.8.27   data.table_1.14.2  rmarkdown_2.16     httr_1.4.4        
[57] rstudioapi_0.14    R6_2.5.1           compiler_4.2.1