[R-pkg-devel] roxygen style documentation for data sets

[Duncan Murdoch]

I just found a couple of packages with add-ins that do something like 
this:  sinew (on CRAN) and docthis on Github at

  https://github.com/mdlincoln/docthis

I think neither of them is quite as smooth as the `Code | Insert Roxygen 
Skeleton` menu item in RStudio, but both do handle dataframes, and it 
doesn't.

Duncan Murdoch

On 21/09/2023 4:30 p.m., Michael L Friendly wrote:
> I am an RStudio user, and I could see this as a plugin somewhere, but I don't want to create a package just for this.
> 
> I'd rather that my code could be adopted somewhere in the framework of devtools/usethis/ ...
> 
> It's so obvious that this tool should be there somewhere, particularly since RStudio makes it hard to work with .Rd files, except those generated by devtools (which shouldn't be
> edited). E.g., I have many legacy .Rd files for data. I can't select example code and click Run, as one can do with roxygen documentation in .R files.
> 
> -Michael
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2023 3:58 PM
> To: Michael L Friendly <friendly using yorku.ca>; r-package-devel using r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] roxygen style documentation for data sets
> 
> Hi Michael.
> 
> I don't know if you're an RStudio user, but this seems ideal as the basis for an RStudio plug-in.  Just install it, then when you want to generate docs for some dataset defined in R code, move to the start of the definition and hit some hot key to insert the documentation skeleton ahead of the data definition.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> On 21/09/2023 12:33 p.m., Michael L Friendly wrote:
>> I have many datasets in a some of my packages, and always used `utils::promptData()` to generate the skeleton of a man/data.Rd file.
>> Now that I've switched to roxygen style, I have found no simple
>> equivalent. In fact, with RStudio tools for generating documentation for functions, it is surprising that documenting data has been overlooked.
>>
>> I solved this problem by simply editing `utils::promptData()` to replace .Rd style with equivalent roxygen tags.
>>
>> The result in now in a gist,
>> https://gist.github.com/friendly/14f3ee1464213bb0b9fbcb489468383b
>> I called this function `use_data_doc()`, because I thought it would be a welcome addition to the usethis package.
>>
>> I hope that someone on this list can advise how to make such a function available to all R package developers.
>>
>> -Michael
>>
>> ---
>> Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
>> Professor, Psychology Dept.
>> York University      Voice: 416 736-2100 x66249
>> 4700 Keele Street    Web: http://www.datavis.ca<http://www.datavis.ca/> | @datavisFriendly
>> Toronto, ONT  M3J 1P3 CANADA
>>
>>
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