In Sage-Bionetworks/redcapdd: Create REDCap Data Dictionaries

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redcapdd

The goal of redcapdd is to generate properly formatted data dictionaries for upload to REDCap.

Installation

devtools::install_github("Sage-Bionetworks/redcapdd")

Creating data dictionaries

You can create a new field with create_fields(). The result will have all of the columns required in a REDCap data dictionary.

When called with no arguments, create_fields() provides a one-row data frame containing all NAs.

library("redcapdd")
create_fields()

You can provide as much information as you want to populate the field; create_fields() will fill out the rest of the columns with NAs.

x <- list(
  `Variable / Field Name` = "patient_name",
  `Field Label` = "Patient name",
  `Identifier?` = "y"
)

create_fields(x)

There are a number of aliases to create_fields() that support the creation of specific field types. These include create_checkbox_field(), create_text_field(), and others. See ?create_fields for more information.

redcapdd also supports chaining operations with %>% and the add_field() function. Like create_fields(), add_field() has aliases for different field types.

create_dd_template() %>%
  add_text_field(
    `Variable / Field Name` = "patient_name",
    `Field Label` = "Patient name",
    `Identifier?` = "y"
  ) %>%
  add_truefalse_field(
    `Variable / Field Name` = "given_birth",
    `Field Label` = "Patient has given birth?"
  )

Other functionality

Certain field types such as dropdown, radio, and checkbox can take multiple options in the Choices, Calculations, OR Slider Labels column. These options need to be in a specific format to be accepted by REDCap's data dictionary validator: 1, option1 | 2, option2 and so on. You can create a string in this format from a character vector with the create_choices() function.

x <- c("red", "green", "blue")
create_choices(x)

Exporting your data dictionary

write_dd() will export your data dictionary with the correct fields quoted. Some must be quoted, but others cannot be or the REDCap validator will complain that the empty strings are invalid values; write_dd() takes care of this for you.

dd <- create_fields(x)
write_dd(dd, "data_dictionary.csv")

Sage-Bionetworks/redcapdd documentation built on May 17, 2019, 6:34 p.m.