[R] include S4 class and methods in a package

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Jun 27, 2008, at 1:44 PM, baptiste Auguié wrote:

> DeaR list,
>
>
> Pardon the stupidity of this question but I've been trying this for  
> a while now without success.
>
> I've followed the example given in the green book "programming with  
> data", and I now have a working example of a S4 class with a few  
> methods (plot, summary, as.data.frame). It's all very nice in one  
> file, but I cannot find the way to put this information in a  
> package. I've created several simple packages (without S4 classes)  
> in the past using package.skeleton and manual editing / adding of  
> some files.
> The question I have now is where do the setClass and setMethod live  
> in the folder tree? I sort of believe they should be defined in a  
> source file in the sub-directory R/, but is there a special name to  
> give to these files, how do they get recognised during installation  
> or build?
>
> I've tried to find the answer in "writing R extensions" but I must  
> have missed the relevant section.

I don't think there's any particular name needed for the file. I had  
a look at Matrix for an example when I was writing an S4 package, and  
kind of followed what they were doing. In my example, I had one file  
that had all the setGeneric calls, and another one named after my S4  
class containing setClass and setMethod. And then you need to work on  
the NAMESPACE file. I think to some extent this is described in  
"1.6.6 Name spaces with formal classes and methods".

Hopefully someone more experienced than me can offer a more  
authoritative answer.

> Many thanks,
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Baptiste

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

> PS: I'm not sure a minimal example is relevant, I could provide one  
> if requested.
>
> OS is MacOS 10.4,
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.7.0 RC (2008-04-21 r45421)
> powerpc-apple-darwin8.10.1
>
> locale:
> en_GB.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] datasets  utils     stats     graphics  grDevices splines    
> grid      methods   base
>
>
> _____________________________
>
> Baptiste Auguié
>
> Physics Department
> University of Exeter
> Stocker Road,
> Exeter, Devon,
> EX4 4QL, UK
>
> Phone: +44 1392 264187
>
> http://newton.ex.ac.uk/research/emag
> http://projects.ex.ac.uk/atto
>