Tell me if any REDCapR modifications could help

[wibeasley]

Hi, I'm the developer of REDCapR. I like your package.

Please tell me if there are things I can add/change to REDCapR that would help REDCapCAST.

[agdamsbo]

Hi @wibeasley
Thanks for reaching out. This package really started out of frustration hearing colleagues complaining about that "castellated" data formatting of REDCap exports when doing longitudinal projects and being used to wide, tidy data working in stata. This led to some bad decisions in building databases avoiding repeated instruments and such. THis package was to be able to say: "I have a solution for that!". And I wanted the added option to download only specified data to avoid exporting everything. I have later realised that others have solved this in packages which probably are better maintained.
I have later also added the functions to "cast" new databases based on spreadsheets and packaged this in a shiny app. I have not seen that other places, and it has really been with the desire to help colleagues and new PhD students to get going faster on new projects and to help migrate old databases, which are not always stored in an easily maintainable way.
That was a bit of background on the package, now that you reached out. I will make sure to let you know if I come with improvements for REDCapR! It is a really convenient package, and much easier to use than redcapAPI. Have you considered handling files stored in REDCap with REDCapR? That is so far the only task, that I've had to use redcapAPI for so far.

[wibeasley]

Thanks for the nice words and the explanation of REDCapCAST.

I'm happy to consider adding any function that helps people. Especially if it lives pretty close to REDCap (and ideally doesn't compete with any existing functionality offered by the packages built on top of REDCapR.)

I assume you've seen redcap_file_download_oneshot() and redcap_file_upload_oneshot(). How could I add on to them that would help?

[agdamsbo]

I assume you've seen redcap_file_download_oneshot() and redcap_file_upload_oneshot(). How could I add on to them that would help?

Actually, I have to admit, that I did not consider using those functions. I wanted to list all functions from RStudio in the file repository. This was possible with redcapAPI. Having the option to list all files in a file tree with the relevant filenames for pulling with redcap_file_download_oneshot() would be very handy I think.

[agdamsbo]

Hi again @wibeasley. I'll just continue this thread. I have been thinking about a data export/read function that would label data based on the data dictionary (eg to correctly include all levels in order for factors). This would very much ease data management from a user perspective. Have you been looking into anything like this?