[Bioc-devel] include data from non self-sufficient .R files

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 3:39 AM, Laurent Gatto <laurent.gatto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Sean,
>
> On 12 October 2010 00:15, Sean Davis <sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Laurent Gatto <laurent.gatto at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I have some data to be included in a package. The data needs to be
>>> easily loadable by the users, optimally with data(), and consists of a
>>> set of class instances, classes that are defined in the package
>>> itself.
>>> Something like:
>>> myData1 <- new("aClass",...) ## in myData1.R
>>> myData2 <- new("aClass",...) ## in myData2.R
>>>
>>> that I would like to be loadable with
>>>
>>> data(myData1)
>>> data(myData2)
>>>
>>> Although putting the .R files that generate the data objects directly
>>> in the data directory would be the simplest solution, I can not this
>>> because the code is not self-sufficient. I can't figure out how to
>>> easily and automatically include these.
>>> What is the suggested way to include this kind of data in a package?
>>>
>>> Thank you very much in advance.
>>>
>>
>> Hi, Laurent.
>> You can save() your data objects and put them in your data directory.  That
>> should do it.  Of course, you will want to document them, also.  You can
>> look at the "Writing R Extensions" manual for more details.
>> Sean
>>
>
> Thank you for the advice. I was rather looking for an automatic way of
> including the objects at installation time, as the code is readily
> available in the package. But as the class and these objects are not
> likely to change too much in the future, adding them once manually is
> fine, of course.
> By the way, I tried to have an R source (in ints/scripts/ or R/)
> create the instances and save() them in data/, but without success.

I'm not sure that I follow (or that you follow :-), but what Sean is
suggesting is that you create the data yourself ... manually. Not by
some automated R script, and then you save() the data into an RData
file that you put into your package's /data directory.

Once the user installs the package, the data will come with the
package ("automatically"). The user can then load that data by using
the data() function calls, as you mentioned.

A call like:

R> data(myData1)

Would then work if you have an *.RData file called "myData1.RData" in
your packages /data folder.

See the help in ?data to get a more detailed overview of how data is
searched for and loaded.

Does that help?

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact