[Bioc-devel] validity method of eSet

[Simon Anders]

Hi,

I have a small complaint about eSet's validity method.

The whole point of an eSet is to ensure consistency between data and 
meta data, and hence, eSet should give a useful error message, if the 
user performs an operation that violates this.


The following works fine:

I subclass eSet and instantiate it with a 10x20 data matrix 'm':

 > setClass( "Foo",
+    contains = "eSet" )
[1] "Foo"
 >
 > m <- matrix( 0, nrow=10, ncol=20 )
 >
 > a <- new( "Foo",
+    assayData = list( data = m ),
+    phenoData = annotatedDataFrameFrom( m, byrow=FALSE ),
+    featureData = annotatedDataFrameFrom( m, byrow=TRUE ) )
 >
 > validObject(a)
[1] TRUE


Now, I attempt to replace the dat matrix with one of wrong dimensions, 
and get a proper error message:

 > assayData(a) <- list( data = matrix( 0, nrow=1, ncol=1 ) )
 > validObject(a)
Error in validObject(a) :
invalid class "Foo" object: 1: feature numbers differ between assayData
    and featureData
invalid class "Foo" object: 2: featureNames differ between assayData
    and featureData
invalid class "Foo" object: 3: sample numbers differ between assayData
    and phenoData
invalid class "Foo" object: 4: sampleNames differ between assayData
    and phenoData


However, I might be tempted to do this here:
 > assayData(a) <- list( data = 0 )

Now, 'validObject' is confused:

1> validObject(a)
Error in rep("...", nrow(d) - 2) : invalid 'times' argument

However, this here gives a proper error message:

 > assayDataValidMembers(assayData(a))
[1] "'AssayData' elements with invalid dimensions: 'data'"


The problem is hence that eSet's validity method first checks the 
dimensions of the assayData and only then calls 'assayDataValidMembers'.

Can we simply turn this around? If so, see attached patch (vs r50433).

Best
    Simon


1> sessionInfo()
R version 2.12.0 (2010-10-15)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8       LC_NUMERIC=C
  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.utf8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8
  [5] LC_MONETARY=C             LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.utf8       LC_NAME=C
  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C              LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
[8] base

other attached packages:
[1] GenomicRanges_1.2.0 IRanges_1.8.0       GenomeGraphs_1.9.0
[4] biomaRt_2.6.0       Biobase_2.10.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RCurl_1.4-3 XML_3.2-0



+---
| Dr. Simon Anders, Dipl.-Phys.
| European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg
| office phone +49-6221-387-8632
| preferred (permanent) e-mail: sanders at fs.tum.de
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