ExperimentHub-class: ExperimentHub objects and their related methods and functions
In ExperimentHub: Client to access ExperimentHub resources

Description Constructors Accessors Subsetting and related operations Cache and hub management Coercion For developers Author(s) Examples

Use ExperimentHub to interact with Bioconductor's ExperimentHub service. Query the instance to discover and use resources that are of interest, and then easily download and import the resource into R for immediate use.

Use ExperimentHub() to retrieve information about all records in the hub. If working offline, add argument localHub=TRUE to work with a local, non-updated hub; It will only have resources available that have previously been downloaded. To force redownload of the hub, refreshHub(hubClass="ExperimentHub") can be utilized.

Discover records in a hub using mcols(), query(), subset(), [, and display().

Retrieve individual records using [[. On first use of a resource, the corresponding files or other hub resources are downloaded from the internet to a local cache. On this and all subsequent uses the files are quickly input from the cache into the R session. If a user wants to download the file again and not use the cache version add the argument force=TRUE.

ExperimentHub records can be added (and sometimes removed) at any time. snapshotDate() restricts hub records to those available at the time of the snapshot. possibleDates() lists snapshot dates valid for the current version of Bioconductor.

The location of the local cache can be found (and updated) with getExperimentHubOption and setExperimentHubOption; removeCache removes all cache resources.

ExperimentHub(..., hub=getExperimentHubOption("URL"), cache=getExperimentHubOption("CACHE"), proxy=getExperimentHubOption("PROXY"), localHub=getExperimentHubOption("LOCAL")):

Create an ExperimentHub instance, possibly updating the current database of records.

In the code snippets below, x and object are ExperimentHub objects.

hubCache(x): Gets the file system location of the local ExperimentHub cache.

hubUrl(x): Gets the URL for the online hub.

length(x): Get the number of hub records.

names(x): Get the names (ExperimentHub unique identifiers, of the form AH12345) of the hub records.

fileName(x): Get the file path of the hub records as stored in the local cache (ExperimentHub files are stored as unique numbers, of the form 12345). NA is returned for those records which have not been cached.

package(x): Returns a named character vector of package name associated with the hub resource.

recordStatus(x, record): Returns a data.frame of the record id and status. x must be a Hub object and record must be a character(1). Can be used to discover why a resource was removed from the hub.

mcols(x): Get the metadata columns describing each record. Columns include:

title: Record title, frequently the file name of the object.
dataprovider: Original provider of the resource, e.g., Ensembl, UCSC.
species: The species for which the record is most relevant, e.g., ‘Homo sapiens’.
taxonomyid: NCBI taxonomy identifier of the species.
genome: Genome build relevant to the record, e.g., hg19.
description: Textual description of the resource, frequently automatically generated from file path and other information available when the record was created.
tags: Single words added to the record to facilitate identification, e.g,. TCGA, Roadmap.
rdataclass: The class of the R object used to represent the object when imported into R, e.g., GRanges, VCFFile.
sourceurl: Original URL of the resource.
sourectype: Format of the original resource, e.g., BED file.

In the code snippets below, x is an ExperimentHub object.

x$name: Convenient reference to individual metadata columns, e.g., x$species.

x[i]: Numerical, logical, or character vector (of ExperimentHub names) to subset the hub, e.g., x[x$species == "Homo sapiens"].

x[[i, force=FALSE, verbose=TRUE]]: Numerical or character scalar to retrieve (if necessary) and import the resource into R. If a user wants to download the file again and not use the cache version add the argument force=TRUE. verbose=FALSE will quiet status messages.

query(x, pattern, ignore.case=TRUE, pattern.op= `&`): Return an ExperimentHub subset containing only those elements whose metadata matches pattern. Matching uses pattern as in grepl to search the as.character representation of each column, performing a logical `&` across columns. e.g., query(x, c("Homo sapiens", "hg19", "GTF")).

pattern: A character vector of patterns to search (via grepl) for in any of the mcols() columns.
ignore.case: A logical(1) vector indicating whether the search should ignore case (TRUE) or not (FALSE).
pattern.op: Any function of two arguments, describing how matches across pattern elements are to be combined. The default `&` requires that only records with all elements of pattern in their metadata columns are returned. `&`, `|` and `!` are most notably available. See "?&" or ?base::Ops for more information.

subset(x, subset): Return the subset of records containing only those elements whose metadata satisfies the expression in subset. The expression can reference columns of mcols(x), and should return a logical vector of length length(x). e.g., subset(x, species == "Homo sapiens" & genome=="GRCh38").

display(object): Open a web browser allowing for easy selection of hub records via interactive tabular display. Return value is the subset of hub records identified while navigating the display.

listResources(hub, package, filterBy=character()): List resources in ExperimentHub associated with package. filterBy is a character vector of search terms.

loadResources(hub, package, filterBy=character()): Load resources in ExperimentHub associated with package. filterBy is a character vector of search terms.

In the code snippets below, x is an ExperimentHub object.

: snapshotDate(x) and snapshotDate(x) <- value: Gets or sets the date for the snapshot in use. value should be one of possibleDates().
: possibleDates(x): Lists the valid snapshot dates for the version of Bioconductor that is being run (e.g., BiocManager::version()).
: cache(x) and cache(x) <- NULL: Adds (downloads) all resources in x, or removes all local resources corresponding to the records in x from the cache. In this case, x would typically be a small subset of ExperimentHub resources. If x is a subset hub from a larger hub, and localHub=TRUE was used to construct the hubs, the original object will need to be reconstructed to reflect the removed resources. See also removeResources for a nicer interface for removing cached resources, or removeCache for deleting the hub cache entirely.
: hubUrl(x): Gets the URL for the online ExperimentHub.
: hubCache(x): Gets the file system location of the local ExperimentHub cache.
: refreshHub(..., hub, cache, proxy, hubClass=c("AnnotationHub", "ExperimentHub")): Force redownload of Hub sqlite file. This returns a Hub object as if calling the constructor (ie. ExperimentHub()). For force redownload specifically for ExperimentHub the base call should be refreshHub(hubClass="ExperimentHub")
: removeResources(hub, ids): Removes listed ids from the local cache. ids are "EH" ids. Returns an updated hub object. To work with updated hub object suggested syntax is to reassign (ie. hub = removeResources(hub, "EH1")). If ids are missing will remove all previously downloaded local resources.
: removeCache(x): Removes local ExperimentHub database and all related resources. After calling this function, the user will have to download any ExperimentHub resources again.

In the code snippets below, x is an ExperimentHub object.

: as.list(x): Coerce x to a list of hub instances, one entry per element. Primarily for internal use.
: c(x, ...): Concatenate one or more sub-hub. Sub-hubs must reference the same ExperimentHub instance. Duplicate entries are removed.

createHubAccessors(pkgname, titles): This helper is intended to be used by ExperimentHub package developers in their .onLoad() function in zzz.R. It generates and exports functions by resource name which allows the resource to be loaded with resource123() in addition to the standard method via the ExperimentHub interface, e.g., ehub[["EH123"]]. When 'metadata=TRUE' just the metadata are displayed, when 'metadata=FALSE' the full resource is loaded, e.g, resource123(metadata=TRUE). See vignette for more information.

Bioconductor Core Team

  ## Create an ExperimentHub object
  ehub <- ExperimentHub()
  ehub

  ## Display packages associated with resources
  unique(package(ehub))
  query(ehub, "alpineData")

  ## Search metadata by general terms
  query(ehub, c("FASTQ", "Homo sapiens"))