REDCapCAST/NEWS.md

REDCapCAST 24.1.1

Functions

• Fix: read_redcap_tables(): checking form names based on data dictionary to allow handling of non-longitudinal projects. Prints invalid form names and invalid event names. If invalid form names are supplied to REDCapR::redcap_read() (which is the backbone), all forms are exported, which is not what we want with a focused approach. Invalid event names will give an output with a rather peculiar formatting.

REDCapCAST 23.12.1

One new function to ease secure dataset retrieval and a few bug fixes.

Functions

• New: easy_redcap() function to ease the retrieval of a dataset with read_redcap_tables() with keyring-package based key storage, which handles secure API set, storage and retrieval. Relies on a small helper function, get_api_key(), which wraps relevant keyring-functions. Includes option to cast the data in a wide format with flag widen.data.
• Fix: REDCap_split(): when using this function on its own, supplying a data set with check boxes would fail if metadata is supplied as a tibble. Metadata is now converted to data.frame. Fixed.
• Fix: read_redcap_tables(): fixed bug when supplying events.

REDCapCAST 23.6.2

This version marks the introduction of a few helper functions to handle database creation.

Functions

• New: ds2dd() function migrating from the stRoke-package. Assists in building a data dictionary for REDCap from a dataset.

• New: strsplitx() function to ease the string splitting as an extension of base::strsplit(). Inspiration from https://stackoverflow.com/a/11014253/21019325 and https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/04/strsplit-but-keeping-the-delimiter/.

• New: d2n() function converts single digits to written numbers. Used to sanitize variable and form names in REDCap database creation. For more universal number to word I would suggest english::word() or xfun::numbers_to_words(), though I have not been testing these.

REDCapCAST 23.6.1

Documentation:

• Updated description.
• Look! A hex icon!
• Heading for CRAN.

REDCapCAST 23.4.1

Documentation:

• Aiming for CRAN

REDCapCAST 23.3.2

Documentation:

• Page added. Vignettes to follow.

• GithubActions tests added and code coverage assessed. Badge galore..

REDCapCAST 23.3.1

New name: REDCapCAST

To reflect new functions and the limitation to only working in R, I have changed the naming of the fork, while still, of course, maintaining the status as a fork.

The versioning has moved to a monthly naming convention.

The main goal this package is to keep the option to only export a defined subset of the whole dataset from the REDCap server as is made possible through the REDCapR::redcap_read() function, and combine it with the work put into the REDCapRITS package and the handling of longitudinal projects and/or projects with repeated instruments.

Functions:

• read_redcap_tables() NEW: this function is mainly an implementation of the combined use of REDCapR::readcap_read() and REDCap_split() to maintain the focused nature of REDCapR::readcap_read(), to only download the specified data. Also implements tests of valid form names and event names. The usual fall-back solution was to get all data.

• redcap_wider() NEW: this function pivots the long data frames from read_redcap_tables() using tidyr::pivot_wider().

• focused_metadata() NEW: a hidden helper function to enable a focused data acquisition approach to handle only a subset of metadata corresponding to the focused dataset.

Notes:

• metadata handling IMPROVED: improved handling of different column names in matadata (DataDictionary) from REDCap dependent on whether it is acquired thorugh the api og downloaded from the server.