README.md
In rmflight/packagestructure: provide graphical views of package structure

packagestructure

Create a graph of the structure of an R package.

May be useful in reducing the cognitive load when writing R packages with any more than a few S4 classes.

Currently only supports S4 classes and slots. See TODO list below.

devtools::install_github("rmflight/packagestructure")

library(packagestructure)
example_package <- system.file("exampledata", package = "packagestructure")
e_g <- class_graph(example_package)
plot(e_g)

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

In this example, classes class_B, class_C directly inherit from class_A, while class_D inherits from class_B. Each of these has particular slots of particular classes. You can see the set of class definitions here.

# not run
library(Matrix)
m_g <- class_graph("package:Matrix")
plot(m_g)

Another package, classGraph is available on Cran, and was created by Martin Maechler based on code originally done by Robert Gentleman. However, that package uses Bioconductor's graph package (which does not handle graph unions nicely), and Rgraphviz, which can be a pain to install on Windows machines, and does not handle slots and their relationships.

Therefore I used some of the relevant code from Martin's package (licensed as GPL, which is why this package is GPL-2 and why he is listed as an author), converted it to use igraph, and did some of my own thing.