Question about exporting field labels

[murphyke]

If you do a manual REDCap export, you have the choice of "labels" or "raw", which affects the column headings, e.g. a choice between "More than one race (choice='White')" and "race_multi___1", for a column for a dropdown-type field whose name is "race_multi" and whose label is "More than one race".

The PyCap documentation claims:

# Same data, but keys will the field labels
data = project.export_records(raw_or_label='label')

However, in the code, it suggests that this option actually controls the values, not the keys, and I saw no difference in the field keys.

Also, the code made it sound like the event_name option might control the use of field labels as keys, but I didn't see that it affected the returned results at all. (My data is in a "classic" repository database project, BTW).

I was hoping to reproduce the effects of a manual export with labels, but it seems that will take a little work (to apply labels, order the fields, etc).

[murphyke]

I see now that the behavior is determined by the REDCap API, not by PyCap. That one bit of documentation could stand to be clarified, however.

[sburns]

Thanks for the doc suggestion, @murphyke. You might consider something like this to get you 90% towards a manual export through the API…

project = Project(foo, bar)
field_to_label = {f['field_name']: f['field_label'] for f in project.metadata}
df = project.export_records(format='df')
df = df.rename(columns=field_to_label)
df.to_csv('exported.csv', index_label=project.def_field)

The ordering is difficult to ensure. Also, all the [form_name]_complete columns will not be renamed. Form status fields are unfortunately not in the data dictionary. You might use project.forms to add renaming keys to the field_to_label dict.

Note, the above requires the pandas library. You could just as easily double-loop through the records and keys, but pandas makes so many things so easy.