In chrishaid/deanslistr: An R package that wraps DeansList's RESTful HTTP API

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deanslistr is an R package that wraps the DeansList RESTful HTTP API for use in R programming. It is currently under active development by Chris Haid at KIPP Chicago with the hope of releasing it on CRAN.

Installation

Installation is easy:

if(!require(devtools)) install_packages('devtools')

devtools::install_github('chrishaid/deanslistr')

Basic Usage

Usage is straightforward for version 1 API endpoints. You simply pass the last portion the endoint path to the endpoint paramater of the deanslist_api() function, along with your domain and API access key:

library(deanslistr)

dla_key <- Sys.getenv("KEY_DLA")

x <- deanslist_api(endpoint = 'suspensions',
                   domain = 'dlacademy',
                   key = dla_key)

x

Notice that while the deanslist_api() will try to coerce nested JSON to a data frame, some fields may be stored as lists (e.g., Penalties and Actions in the above response). So pay attion to the content that's returned; you might need to do some more munging with something like tidyr::unnest()

The remaing beta endpoints are taken processed on a case by case basis and require passing the endpoint_version = 'beta' to the deanslist_api():

x <- deanslist_api(endpoint = 'users',
                   domain = 'dlacademy',
                   key = dla_key,
                   endpoint_version = 'beta')

x

Convenience Wrappers

The package has some convenience functions that wrap deanslist_api() for specific endpoints. These wrappers all start with a get_ prefix. The first (and curruntly only) wrapper is get_suspensions. The onus for these functions is to facilitate calling deanslist_api for multiple schools. If you have six schools you will need to provide 6 keys to deanslist_api, one-at-a-time. the get_ functions can take take multiple keys via the key_list parameter. Better still, you can store keys in .Renviron file, which will be sourced when R starts (if saved in a users home directory). The keys' variables need to fit hte pattern of DL_KEY_ where the SCHOOL bit can be any test string. get_ wrappers, if not passed a list of keys explicitely, will look to your environment variables for keys stored in the DL_KEY_ variables and requirest the data from DeansList and (try to) store the returned data as a list of data frames. This list of data frames is best handled with purrr or other tidyverse functions.

x <- get_suspensions(domain = 'dlacademy`)

chrishaid/deanslistr documentation built on May 13, 2019, 6:53 p.m.