[BioC] org.*.eg.db problem

[Laurent Gautier]

On 01/12/10 17:50, Martin Morgan wrote:
> On 12/01/2010 08:48 AM, arne.mueller at novartis.com wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> the org.*.eg.db environments cannot be used in a generic way :-( . Let's
>> say I'm writing a function that needs an entire org.*.eg.db environment as
>> argument, and the function doesn't care whether it's human, mouse rat or
>> jellyfish. Inside my function I'd be required accessing the maps (e.g. for
>> chromosomal location) without knowing the species. The problem is that you
>> do need to know the species because the mapping names use the species
>> abbreviation:
>>
>>> org.Mm.egCHRLOC
>> CHRLOC map for Mouse (object of class "AnnDbMap")
>>
>> Why isn't this more generic so that one could just call egCHRLOC instead
>> of org.Mm.egCHRLOC which makes code that uses this annotation having to
>> know about the organism - why does it have to be be hard coded? Ideally
>> I'd like to be able to do the following:
>>

This is likely a design decision forced by R's scoping rule for attached 
packages: attaching a package will bring its (exported) content into the 
search path.
In other words, if you would have a package org.Mm.eg.db and a package 
org.Hs.eg.db, both containing an object egCHRLOC, the symbol egCHRLOC 
would be resolved to two different things depending on which one of the 
two packages was attached last.

This does prevent some of the patterns frequently found in other 
language from being (safely) implemented
(and is unfortunate).


>>> library(org.Mm.eg.db)
>>> myGenomeAnnotationFunction(org.Mm.eg.db)  { # pass in as an environment?
>>        # use the annotation environment to extract whatever information ...
>> }
>>
>> How would you solve this when having to work with several species (if else
>> ... ???)
>>
>
> Hi arne --
>
> For many cases,
>
> library(annotate)
> map<- getAnnMap("CHRLOC", "org.Mm.eg.db")
>
> which will take care of loading the org package as well.
>
> Martin
>
>
>>    thanks a lot for your help,
>>
>>    Arne
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>