REDCapExporter

Download the data from a REDCap project and package the data into a useful R data package.

Project Goals

While REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a fantastic tool for data capture, the dissemination of the collected data in a format that multiple data analysis can easily access and share can be improved. The REDCapExporter is a tool that will collect the data and generate a source R data package. With continued use, analysts will gain the following:

• A consistent documentation format for the collected data

• A consistent format/storage mode for REDCap data

• A set of tools to help easily clean collected data.

Why is this tool needed?

If you are familiar with REDCap then you know that exporting the data from the web interface is straight forward, easy to use, and powerful. However, there is a fair amount of (meta) data that could be valuable to data analysis which is not included in the export. The REDCapExporter aims to report and cross link the meta data, collected data, and (expanded) documentation in one location. The resulting .tar.gz data package is easy to disseminate.

Version control of data is difficult. Small data files can easily be added to git repositories, and larger files using git-lfs. Subversion can handle larger data sets with its own pros and cons. However, adding the data to multiple repositories will consume a lot of disk space unnecessarily and there are issues arising from sensitive data being versioned and while using public repository hosts. A R data package will provide an implicit versioning of data while keeping only one copy of the data on the local disk.

For example, in a R analysis script, the analysis can verify the version of any package via the following:

packageVersion("<pkg_name>", lib.loc = "<path>") <= "2.1"

The above will return TRUE or FALSE. As such, the above can be the argument in an if() statement. If FALSE, stop() call can be used to stop the scripts and let the analyst know the package (data) version is not as expected.

# TODO, example of pkg_check, once it has been built