Intended to be used in conjunction with caching stagerunners, the objectdiff package helps keep the recording of many operations on a data set concise. If you are munging a data set, it would be ideal to record the progress so you can "rewind" and interactively debug what happened in the past if you ever end up with a data set that is either incorrect or malformed, without incurring too much memory overhead.
Objectdiff solves this problem by providing a mechanism of "patching" arbitrary R objects to turn them into other ones. For example,
iris2 <- iris[, -1]
iris2[[1]] <- as.character(iris2[[1]])
patch <- objectdiff(iris, iris2)
stopifnot(identical(iris2, patch(iris)))In this example, patch is a function we can apply to the iris dataset to turn it into iris2.
The point here is that instead of storing both iris and iris2, which could
get memory-prohibitive very quickly, we only need to store iris and its patch
(or sequence of patches).
If we applied ten different manipulations to a dataset, we could keep a history of our changes by storing the successive patches in conjunction with the initial data set. In essence, objectdiff aims to be a "Git for R data."
Hand in hand with patching R objects is the idea of tracking all changes to
an environment. For this purpose,
objectdiff provides a tracked_environment object. Consider the
following example.
e <- tracked_environment(new.env())
e$x <- 1
commit(e) <- 'First commit' # Store changes -- NULL for no commit message
e$x <- 2
commit(e) <- 'Second commit'
e$x <- 3
commit(e) <- 'Third commit'
print(e$x)
# [1] 3
rollback(e) <- 2 # Roll back two commits
print(e$x)
# [1] 1 # Back to the first commit! This environment remembers changes.This package is not yet available from CRAN (as of October 5, 2015). To install the latest development builds directly from GitHub, run this instead:
if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("robertzk/objectdiff")