R Shiny/ Restful Api Communication

Question

I have a shiny app that takes an input file in Json Runs it through a classifier and returns a classified Json object. I want the app to be able to communicate with an API. I want the API to post a file to the Shiny App which will do its work and return a classified object. Basically I want the Shiny app to sit in the background until a file is posted and then do its work. I know that I can use GET from the httr package to get a file from a url. I can put this in the shiny.server file which is fine if I know the file name for the get command

However the filenames coming from the API will be different. So is there any way that I can make this dynamic according to the Post request that comes from the API.

Answer 1

If you do not have to use Shiny, you can use openCPU. OpenCPU provides each of your R packages as REST service automatically. I work with OpenCPU and it works fine! It is the easiest way to use R from another program.