New submission: tidyhydat

[boshek]

Summary

• What does this package do? (explain in 50 words or less): tidyhydat provides functions to extract historical and real-time national hydrometric data from Water Survey of Canada data sources

• Paste the full DESCRIPTION file inside a code block below:

Package: tidyhydat
Title: Extract and Tidy Canadian Hydrometric Data
Version: 0.2.9
Authors@R: c(person("Sam", "Albers", email = "sam.albers@gov.bc.ca", role = c("aut", "cre"),
           ), person("David", "Hutchinson", email = "david.hutchinson@canada.ca", role = "ctb"),
           person("Province of British Columbia", role = "cph"))
Description: tidyhydat provides functions to extract historical and real-time national hydrometric
  data from Water Survey of Canada data sources (http://dd.weather.gc.ca/hydrometric/csv/ and
  http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/cmc/hydrometrics/www/) and then apply tidy data principles.
Depends: R (>= 3.4.0)
License: Apache License (== 2.0) | file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/bcgov/tidyhydat
BugReports: https://github.com/bcgov/tidyhydat/issues
Encoding: UTF-8
Imports:
    dplyr (>= 0.7.3),
    readr (>= 1.1.1),
    lubridate (>= 1.6.0),
    tidyr (>= 0.7.1),
    DBI (>= 0.7),
    RSQLite (>= 2.0),
    tibble (>= 1.3.4),
    httr (>= 1.3.1)
Suggests:
    tidyverse,
    dbplyr,
    knitr,
    rmarkdown,
    testthat
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 6.0.1
VignetteBuilder: knitr

• URL for the package (the development repository, not a stylized html page): https://github.com/bcgov/tidyhydat

• Please indicate which category or categories from our package fit policies this package falls under *and why:

  • data retrieval: tidyhydat retrieves data from the Water Survey of Canada datamart via the download_realtime_dd() function from http://dd.weather.gc.ca/hydrometric/csv/. download_realtime_ws provides access via the httr package to a new password protected web service provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Differences between the download realtime functions are outlined here
  • data extraction: The majority of tidyhydat's exported functions provide easy access to ECCC's publicly available and open-licenced HYDAT sqlite3 database (http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/cmc/hydrometrics/www/) of historical river and lake levels in Canada. HYDAT is updated quarterly and is distributed via the Canadian Open Government Licence. HYDAT is not included with this package because it is regularly updated and because the file size is prohibitively large (>1GB) for inclusion in an R package. Rather tidyhydat provides the download_hydat() function that downloads it for the user.

• Who is the target audience?

  • Anyone who is interested in making use of the Water Survey of Canada data sources in R including industry, government and academics.

• Are there other R packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does
  yours differ or meet our criteria for best-in-category?

  • A search of the term "hydat" on github reveals two R packages that provide similar (but not all the same) functionality:
  • HYDAT: the original author of HYDAT has contributed to this package and further development or maintenance of HYDAT is not imminent.
  • hydatr was developed at approximately the same time as tidyhydat.
  • tidyhydat documentation is more comprehensive than both packages.
  • Through the realtime functions tidyhydat provides added functionality not present in both packages. Neither HYDAT nor hydatr provide any functionality to access the web service and hydatr does not access any real-time datamart data.
  • An express goal of tidyhydat is to provide data in a tidy format. This conceptual data science goal provides a clear objective that is missing from both other packages.

Requirements

Confirm each of the following by checking the box. This package:

• does not violate the Terms of Service of any service it interacts with.
• has a CRAN and OSI accepted license.
• contains a README with instructions for installing the development version.
• includes documentation with examples for all functions.
• contains a vignette with examples of its essential functions and uses.
• has a test suite.
• has continuous integration, including reporting of test coverage, using services such as Travis CI, Coeveralls and/or CodeCov.
• I agree to abide by ROpenSci's Code of Conduct during the review process and in maintaining my package should it be accepted.

Publication options

• Do you intend for this package to go on CRAN?
• Do you wish to automatically submit to the Journal of Open Source Software? If so:
  • The package has an obvious research application according to JOSS's definition.
  • The package contains a paper.md matching JOSS's requirements with a high-level description in the package root or in inst/.
  • The package is deposited in a long-term repository with the DOI:
  • (Do not submit your package separately to JOSS)

Detail

• Does R CMD check (or devtools::check()) succeed? Paste and describe any errors or warnings:

• Does the package conform to rOpenSci packaging guidelines? Please describe any exceptions:

• If this is a resubmission following rejection, please explain the change in circumstances:

• If possible, please provide recommendations of reviewers - those with experience with similar packages and/or likely users of your package - and their GitHub user names:

Taken from the list reviewers as folks that might be appropriate:

• Joseph Stachelek: @jsta
• Jeffrey Hollister: @jhollist
• Alison Appling: @aappling-usgs
• Laura DeCicco: @ldecicco-USGS

[boshek]

Results of goodpractice (Updated 2017-09-14)

> goodpractice::gp()
Preparing: covr
Preparing: cyclocomp
* installing *source* package 'tidyhydat' ...
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** installing vignettes
** testing if installed package can be loaded
*** arch - i386
*** arch - x64
* DONE (tidyhydat)
Preparing: description
Preparing: lintr
Preparing: namespace
Preparing: rcmdcheck
── GP tidyhydat ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

It is good practice to

  ✖ write unit tests for all functions, and all package code in general. 69% of code lines are covered by test cases.

    R/ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:43:NA
    R/ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:44:NA
    R/ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:48:NA
    R/ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:49:NA
    R/ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:50:NA
    ... and 391 more lines

  ✖ avoid long code lines, it is bad for readability. Also, many people prefer editor windows that are about 80 characters
    wide. Try make your lines shorter than 80 characters

    inst\doc\tidyhydat.R:2:1
    R\ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:84:1
    R\ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:87:1
    R\ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:90:1
    R\ANNUAL_INSTANT_PEAKS.R:97:1
    ... and 397 more lines

  ✖ not import packages as a whole, as this can cause name clashes between the imported packages. Instead, import only the
    specific functions you need.
  ✖ fix this R CMD check NOTE: Note: found 20 marked UTF-8 strings
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 

[sckott]

thanks for your submission @boshek - We're discussing this now and will get back to you soon

[sckott]

Editor checks:

• Fit: The package meets criteria for fit and overlap
• Automated tests: Package has a testing suite and is tested via Travis-CI or another CI service.
• License: The package has a CRAN or OSI accepted license
• Repository: The repository link resolves correctly
• Archive (JOSS only, may be post-review): The repository DOI resolves correctly
• Version (JOSS only, may be post-review): Does the release version given match the GitHub release (v1.0.0)?

---

Editor comments

again, thanks for your submission @boshek

Thanks for including goodpractice output

Seeking reviewers now.

---

Reviewers: @ldecicco-USGS @lawinslow
Due date: 2017-10-18

[boshek]

NOTE: Version update since original submission. goodpractice output is unchanged and the DESCRIPTION file above has updated accordingly. Changes are catalogued in the NEWS.md file in the tidyhydat repo.

[sckott]

Reviewers are @ldecicco-USGS and @lawinslow - thanks for reviewing! due date above