blueprintr

blueprintr is a plugin to drake that adds automated steps for tabular dataset documentation and testing. Designed for social science research projects, this package creates a framework to build trust in your data and to prevent programming issues from affecting your analysis results.

Usage

Define blueprints of your data using blueprint(). Blueprints combine drake target commands with some extra metadata about the output tabular dataset, including the name and description of the data.

library(blueprintr)

blueprint1 <- blueprint(
  "blueprint1",
  description = "My first blueprint",
  command = {
    # Put all code related to building this dataset here
    mtcars
  }
)

blueprint1
#> <blueprint: 'blueprint1'>
#> 
#> Description: My first blueprint
#> Annotations: DISABLED
#> Metadata location: '/Users/patrickanker/dev/blueprintr/blueprints/blueprint1.csv'
#> 
#> -- Command --
#> Workflow command:
#> {
#>     mtcars
#> }
#> 
#> Raw command:
#> {
#>     mtcars
#> }

Refer to other datasets using .TARGET() to guarantee that parent datasets are also tested and documented. Run checks on the dataset entirely with the checks parameter and define variable tests in the metadata files.

no_missing_cyl <- function(df) {
  all(!is.na(df$cyl))
}

blueprint2 <- blueprint(
  "blueprint2",
  description = "My second blueprint that depends on another",
  checks = check_list(
    no_missing_cyl()
  ),
  command =
    .TARGET("blueprint1") %>%
      filter(cyl == 4)
)

Once all blueprints are defined, attach them to a plan using attach_blueprint() or attach_blueprints() so drake can run the needed tasks.

library(magrittr)
library(drake)

plan_from_blueprint(blueprint1) %>%
  attach_blueprint(blueprint2)

drake handles the code execution based on the targets generated by blueprintr.

Installation

As blueprintr is not yet on CRAN, you must install the package from this repository:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("nyuglobalties/blueprintr")

Contributing

Please note that the ‘blueprintr’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.