How to add a button to deselect a choice?

[durraniu]

Description

Is it possible to add a button to deselect a choice for mc questions. This is when the question is not required but a respondent may accidentally selects a choice and now wants to deselect it.

[jhelvy]

I already know this is going to be difficult to implement, because we're relying on Shiny for our input widgets, which don't be default have this functionality to my knowledge. We'd have to come up with some way for a user to click some additional button that "resets" the question or something, which is an odd behavior. It seems this is also not possible on other platforms like Qualtrics. I wonder if the solution might just be to include a "none" option as one of the choices, that way if the user clicks accidentally, they can select the "none" option to avoid responding to something that they didn't intend?

[durraniu]

In a regular shiny app, we can add a deselect button or link when renderUI is used. I guess that can also be used with surveydown with custom input function?

Using a none option is also a good idea, thanks.

[jhelvy]

Can you show an example of a simple shiny app that allows a radio button to be deselected? If it can be done in shiny, then it should be possible in surveydown

[durraniu]

Yes, here is an example on shinylive

Code

library(shiny)
library(bslib)

ui <- page_sidebar(
  title = "Radio Button with Deselect",
  sidebar = sidebar(
    radioButtons(
      "radio_choice",
      "Choose an option:",
      choices = list(
        "Option A" = "a",
        "Option B" = "b", 
        "Option C" = "c"
      ),
      selected = character(0)  # Start with no selection
    ),
    # Use uiOutput to conditionally render the deselect button
    uiOutput("deselect_button_ui")
  ),
  card(
    card_header("Current Selection"),
    textOutput("selection_display")
  )
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  
  # Display the current selection
  output$selection_display <- renderText({
    if (is.null(input$radio_choice) || input$radio_choice == "") {
      "No option selected"
    } else {
      paste("Selected:", input$radio_choice)
    }
  })
  
  # Conditionally render the deselect button
  output$deselect_button_ui <- renderUI({
    if (!is.null(input$radio_choice) && input$radio_choice != "") {
      actionButton("deselect_btn", "Deselect", class = "btn-outline-secondary")
    }
  })
  
  # Handle deselect button click
  observeEvent(input$deselect_btn, {
    updateRadioButtons(
      session,
      "radio_choice",
      selected = character(0)  # Deselect all options
    )
  })
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

[jhelvy]

Okay, that's what I was guessing you would do. Just have an additional button that pops up that allows you to deselect. I was thinking you were asking if there was some existing Shiny widget that had this already built in.

So this is something we could consider adding internal support for, but I'm worried it would create a lot of clutter on the screen. I haven't seen this kind of feature in most surveys either, so I'm leaning towards not yet supporting it natively in the package and leaving it to the user to add themselves, which you could do by adding calls to uiOutput() in your survey.qmd and using renderUI like you have in this example in your server function in the app.R file. There may be a cleaner way to support it natively and create a simpler looking button that appears to deselect, but that would require some trial and error to see if you can get it looking nice.