prep_create_meta function

Support function to create data.frame s of metadata

Create a metadata data frame and map names. Generally, this function only creates a data.frame , but using this constructor instead of calling data.frame(..., stringsAsFactors = FALSE), it becomes possible, to adapt the metadata data.frame in later developments, e.g. if we decide to use classes for the metadata, or if certain standard names of variable attributes change. Also, a validity check is possible to implement here.

prep_create_meta(..., stringsAsFactors = FALSE, level, character.only = FALSE)

Arguments

• ...: named column vectors, names will be mapped using WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES , if included in WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES

  can also be a data frame, then its column names will be mapped using WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES

• stringsAsFactors: logical if the argument is a list of vectors, a data frame will be created. In this case, stringsAsFactors controls, whether characters will be auto-converted to Factors, which defaults here always to false independent from the default.stringsAsFactors .

• level: enum level of requirement (see also VARATT_REQUIRE_LEVELS ) set to NULL, if not a complete metadata frame is created.

• character.only: logical a logical indicating whether level can be assumed to be character strings.

Returns

a data frame with:

• metadata attribute names mapped and
• metadata checked using prep_check_meta_names and do some more verification about conventions, such as check for valid intervals in limits)

Details

For now, this calls data.frame , but it already renames variable attributes, if they have a different name assigned in WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES , e.g. WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES$RECODE maps to recode in lower case.

NB: dataquieR exports all names from WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAME as symbols, so RECODE also contains "recode".

See Also

WELL_KNOWN_META_VARIABLE_NAMES