orderly_search: Query orderly's database

In orderly: Lightweight Reproducible Reporting

Query orderly's database

Description

Evaluate a query against the orderly database (within ⁠.outpack/⁠), returning a vector of matching packet ids. Note that by default this only searches through packets that are unpacked and available for direct use on this computer; to search within packets known to other locations (and that we might know about via their metadata) you will need to use the location, allow_remote and fetch_metadata arguments.

Usage

orderly_search(
  expr,
  name = NULL,
  scope = NULL,
  subquery = NULL,
  parameters = NULL,
  envir = parent.frame(),
  location = NULL,
  allow_remote = NULL,
  fetch_metadata = FALSE,
  options = NULL,
  root = NULL
)

Arguments

expr	The query expression. A NULL expression matches everything.
name	Optionally, the name of the packet to scope the query on. This will be intersected with scope arg and is a shorthand way of running scope = list(name = "name")
scope	Optionally, a scope query to limit the packets searched by pars
subquery	Optionally, named list of subqueries which can be referenced by name from the expr.
parameters	Optionally, a named list of parameters to substitute into the query (using the ⁠this:⁠ prefix)
envir	Optionally, an environment to substitute into the query (using the ⁠environment:⁠ prefix). The default here is to use the calling environment, but you can explicitly pass this in if you want to control where this lookup happens.
location	Optional vector of locations to pull from. We might in future expand this to allow wildcards or exceptions.
allow_remote	Logical, indicating if we should allow packets to be found that are not currently unpacked (i.e., are known only to a location that we have metadata from). If this is TRUE, then in conjunction with orderly_dependency() you might pull a large quantity of data. The default is NULL. This is TRUE if remote locations are listed explicitly as a character vector in the location argument, or if you have specified fetch_metadata = TRUE, otherwise FALSE.
fetch_metadata	Logical, indicating if we should pull metadata immediately before the search. If location is given, then we will pass this through to orderly_location_fetch_metadata() to filter locations to update. If pulling many packets in sequence, you will want to update this option to FALSE after the first pull, otherwise it will update the metadata between every packet, which will be needlessly slow.
options	DEPRECATED. Please don't use this any more, and instead use the arguments location, allow_remote and fetch_metadata directly.
root	The path to the root directory, or NULL (the default) to search for one from the current working directory. This function does not require that the directory is configured for orderly, and can be any outpack root (see orderly_init() for details).

Value

A character vector of matching ids. In the case of no match from a query returning a single value (e.g., latest(...) or single(...)) this will be a character missing value (NA_character_)

Examples

path <- orderly_example()

# Generate a bunch of packets:
suppressMessages({
  orderly_run("data", echo = FALSE, root = path)
  orderly_run("depends", echo = FALSE, root = path)
  for (n in c(2, 4, 6, 8)) {
    orderly_run("parameters", list(max_cyl = n), echo = FALSE, root = path)
  }
})

# By default, search returns everything, which is rarely what you want:
orderly_search(root = path)

# Restricting by name is common enough that there's a shortcut for
# it:
orderly_search(name = "data", root = path)
orderly_search(name = "parameters", root = path)

# Restrict to a parameter value:
orderly_search(quote(parameter:max_cyl > 4), name = "parameters",
               root = path)

orderly documentation built on Jan. 24, 2026, 1:07 a.m.