DatawRappr

The goal of DatawRappr is to provide a wrapper for Datawrapper's API to connect data from R directly with Datawrapper's charts capabilities. It uses the new API version 3.0.

Key features:

• Manages and automatically retrieves the API-key locally via datawrapper_auth()
• Creates, deletes or publishes charts on Datawrapper
• Sends Dataframes from R directly to Datawrapper - without having to copy them in - with dw_data_to_chart()

All functions (except datawrapper_auth()) are preceded by dw_:

• allows test calls to the API via dw_test_key()
• lists all created charts: dw_list_charts().
• lists all folders: dw_list_folders().
• creates a new Datawrapper chart via dw_create_chart()
• copy a existing chart with: dw_copy_chart()
• adds data from a R-dataframe to an existing Datawrapper chart via dw_data_to_chart()
• retrieves (dw_retrieve_chart_metadata()) or edits metadata, description and visualization of an existing chart via dw_edit_chart()
• publishes and republishes a Datawrapper chart via dw_publish_chart()
• deletes an Datawrapper chart via dw_delete_chart()
• exports a chart as png, pdf or svg (latter two only in paid accounts) with dw_export_chart()

Installation

Right now this package is experimental and only available on Github:

# install.packages("devtools") # if not already installed on your system
devtools::install_github("munichrocker/DatawRappr")

Usage

Add the package to your environment by running:

library(DatawRappr)

Setting up the API-key

To use the API you have to create an API key on Datawrapper.

Click on Dashboard - Settings and move down to the section that says API Access Tokens.

Click on Create new personal access token, enter a name and save the token:

Copy the API key in the clipboard and use

datawrapper_auth(api_key = "12345678")

to save the key to our system. If a key already exists, you may add the argument overwrite = TRUE to datawrapper_auth().

To make sure, your key is working as expected, you can run

dw_test_key()

with no arguments. It will then use the saved key from the environment. If the key is correct, you will receive a response from the API with personal details about your account - a dw_user-object that has no further use than to check your key.

Note: If you want to see your currently saved API key, you may use the helper function dw_get_api_key().

Congratulations, you're good to go!

Under the hood

This package makes heavy use of the httr-package, which on itself is a wrapper of the curl-package.

Further Links

There is a API-documentation and a Getting Started guide with examples from Datawrapper.

A full Package-documentation can be found here.