NEWS

ordinalsimr 0.2.4 (2026-02-26)

Update the main ordinalsimr vignette to provide a broader background on the app, functions, and project
Fix a bug in passing the correct environment function to the callr::r_bg() process in the run_simulations_in_background() function used by the Shiny app. This bug was silently blocking simulations starting at 0.2.0

wilcox.test() now defaults to exact = FALSE to fix failing tests on some distributions

Allow users to specify a step size in the sequence of sample sizes in the Shiny app
Fix bug in progress bars where they would not update if the sample size was of length 1
Only display progress bars if their underlying simulation is running
Add a confidence interval toggle button to the Shiny power plot
Replace distribution plots with box plots in the Shiny app to better visualize the distribution of the data
Remove magrittr dependency
Use dynamic labeling of x-axis in the Shiny app to better reflect the data being plotted

callr::r_bg() is now used for between- and within- group simulations in the Shiny application to enable the user to continue using the application while the simulation is running, and to run the processes in parallel to one another
A "Kill Simulations" button has been added to the Shiny application to allow the user to stop the simulation process if it is taking too long. Simulations are still killed when the application is closed
Progress bars have been added to the Shiny application to show the progress of the simulations, and the user can open or close the progress bars with a button
Additional validation checks have been added to the Shiny application to control the rendering of plots and tables that require reactive elements
fisher.test() now defaults to simulate.p.value = TRUE. This should reduce computational load and time particularly with larger group sizes and when simulations have a larger number of ordinal categories
The package now requires "bslib" version 0.9.0 or higher to use the navbar_options option in page_navbar()
Change the DOI in the citation file to the general Zenodo repository link
A modal pop-up indicating the limitations of running the app on ShinyApps.io is available, and only triggered with the option is.shinyapps.deployment = TRUE. This is to inform users that the app may not run as expected on ShinyApps.io due to the computational intensity of spawning multiple R processes.

Significantly refined the UI
Allowed more options for pre-setting simulation inputs, created a .onLoad to set some of these values, and created the set_ordinalsimr_options function to allow users to set these values themselves.
Added a custom CSS file
Updated version of {renv} in use
Added {ordinalsimr} to the ignored packages in renv/settings.json
Use bslib::bs_theme(version = 5, bootswatch = "materia") for theming the app
Create a zipped download of the report, the Rmd file to create the report, and the data generated by the simulation
Expose more parameters to the downloadable report
Create tests for .onLoad behavior