R shiny Layout struggles

Question

I've been flicking through pages and pages of results but can't seem to get this working. Below is a crude paint diagram of how I want my dashboard to look. The code below shows a couple of things that I have tried, hopefully there is something obvious I'm missing. I'm getting close but I could do with something like a fluid column or something as table 1 is longer than the 1st ggplot output

dashboardBody(
                      column(width = 2,
                             fluidRow(tableOutput('ptable')),
                             fluidRow(tableOutput('ptable'))),
                      column(width = 10,
                             fluidRow(plotOutput("Calplot")),
                             fluidRow(plotOutput("CalHeat")))

fluidRow(
                          column(width = 2, tableOutput('ptable')),
                          column(width = 10, plotOutput("Calplot"))
                        ),
                      fluidRow(
                          column(width = 2, tableOutput('ctable')),
                          column(width = 10, plotOutput("CalHeat"))
                          )

Answer 1

Maybe you want to try a column-based layout. A very good explanation can be found here. This example combines column with box, where you can define the width for each object.
I also switched to DT tables, as I find them more powerful and easy to style, for example the options = list(scrollX = TRUE, pageLength = 12), which renders the table nicely and adds a scroller to the table. If you would remove this option, the table and plot would overlay.

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
library(DT)

ui = dashboardPage(
  dashboardHeader(),
  dashboardSidebar(
    sliderInput("obs", "Number of observations:", min = 0, max = 1000, value = 500),  
    sliderInput("obs1", "Number of observations:", min = 0, max = 1000, value = 500),  
    sliderInput("obs2", "Number of observations:", min = 0, max = 1000, value = 500)  
  ),
  dashboardBody(
    column(width = 12,
           box(width = 3, DT::dataTableOutput('table1'),
               DT::dataTableOutput('table2')),

           box(width = 9, plotOutput("plot2"),
               plotOutput("plot1"))
    )
  )
)

server = function(input, output) { 
  output$table1 <- DT::renderDataTable({
    datatable(mtcars, caption = "table1",
              options = list(scrollX = TRUE,
              pageLength = 12))
  }) 
  output$table2 <- DT::renderDataTable({
    datatable(mtcars[,1:3], caption = "table2")
  })  

  output$plot1 <- renderPlot({
    plot(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$cyl, main = "plot1")
  })  
  output$plot2 <- renderPlot( {
    plot(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$cyl, main = "plot2")
  })  

}

shinyApp(ui, server)