archivist 1.5

Archivist is an R package for object management (storing, sharing, searching). I am going to present it on useR conference next week (hope I can meet some of you in Aalborg). Below you will find two coolest (imho) features implemented in the version 1.5 of archivist.

Function: aread()

Archivist stores R objects (artifacts) in collections called repositories. Repositories are either local (a directory) or remote (e.g. GitHub repository). Function saveToRepo() saves R objects to a given repository. Then repositories may be shared and other users may retrieve objects with the function aread().
The only argument of aread() is a hook (link) to the repository and object’s md5 hash. For example you can use two lines of code to load the ggplot2 object presented below.

library(archivist)
aread("pbiecek/graphGallery/4305c5b68bade4fdf2d7b4033dc19fa5")

The result of aread() is an R object. One can modify it (change colors, title) or extract data from it. You can add such hooks to every plot, table, dataset in a report, blog post or an application. Readers may then retrieve them easily. Hash is 32 characters long, but it is enough to specify only first few of them.

 

Function: ahistory()

In the archivist you will find an operator %a% which behaves like %>% from magrittr, but additionally stores all partial results in a default repository. Then with the use of ahistory() one can retrieve the object’s history with hooks to all partial results.
Let’s consider a following example.

library(dplyr)
tmp = iris %a%
filter(Sepal.Length > 6) %a%
lm(Petal.Length~Species, data=.) %a%
summary()

Having the object of it’s md5 hash one can retrieve the object’s history.

ahistory(tmp)
iris                                   [ff575c261c949d073b2895b05d1097c3]
filter(Sepal.Length < 6)           [d3696e13d15223c7d0bbccb33cc20a11]
lm(Petal.Length ~ Species, data = .)  [990861c7c27812ee959f10e5f76fe2c3]
summary()                             [050e41ec3bc40b3004bc6bdd356acae7]

What for?

The goal of the architect is to enrich reports, applications, articles, blog posts in hooks to recoverable results.
Przemylaw Biecek