cran-comments.md

Resubmission

The first submission of 0.5.1 failed the incoming pretest because two of the restored vignettes carried inline R expressions that evaluated regardless of the chunk-level eval guard, one of which made a network request. Those expressions now fall back to fixed text unless the vignettes are compiled locally, and the package has been rebuilt and checked with the guard variable unset.

Test environments

• local macOS install, R 4.6.0
• GitHub Actions macOS-latest (release), windows-latest (release), ubuntu-latest (devel, release, oldrel-1)

R CMD check results

There were no ERRORs or WARNINGs or NOTEs, with --as-cran --run-donttest.

Notes on examples

This package retrieves data from Statistics Canada web services. Their servers time out or go down for maintenance from time to time, which has caused checks of this package to fail in the past through no fault of the package. As of version 0.5.0 no function aborts when Statistics Canada cannot be reached, it emits a warning and returns NULL instead. Examples that make a single lightweight API call are therefore wrapped in \donttest{} and complete without error whether or not Statistics Canada is reachable, which we verified by running them with all requests to Statistics Canada blocked. The remaining \dontrun{} examples are the ones that download an entire data table or the full table catalogue, they are excluded because of their run time, not because they might fail.

Changes from version 0.2.1

• Redundancies removed from package title
• Implement timeout and retry for API requests to remote servers
• Reduced number of vignettes to be generated during package build--putting them online on an accompanying package website instead.

Changes from version 0.2.2

• Correct problem with incorrect encoding

Changes from version 0.2.3

• Fixes issues arising from StatCan changing their API
• Adds some post-processing options in normalize_cansim_values

Changes from version 0.3.0

• Fixes issues arising from StatCan changing their API row limit
• Optimize vector retrieval by REF_DATE

Changes from version 0.3.1

• Adjust package for changes in StatCan API with different metadata format

Changes from version 0.3.2

• Fix time zone problem when parsing and formatting times for the StatCan API

Changes from version 0.3.3

• Expand get_cansim_table_notes functionality
• Add functionality to access the new cube list API

Changes from version 0.3.4

• Exclude all vignettes and example code from compilation as this may cause CRAN check errors when StatCan servers are down or otherwise temporarily unavailable

Changes from version 0.3.5

• Fold part of normalize_cansim_values into the default table and vector output, in particular always add a scaled variable column called val_norm and an imputed Date column and covert categories to factors by default.
• New get_cansim_sqlite function that stores tables in an SQLite database and facilitates access and management of data.
• Adapt to changes in dplyr, tidyr, and tibble
• fix a bug that would not properly add hierarchies when category names are repeated
• Use system unzip if getOption("unzip") is set to enable unzip for files larger than 4GB on unix-like systems

Changes from version 0.3.6

• Fix problem with UTF-8 encoding on solaris
• move dbplyr dependence from Imports to Suggests

Changes from version 0.3.7

Minor changes

• Exclude vignette from automatic CRAN checks to fix problem of CRAN checks failing when StatCan servers are down and lead to the package being removed from CRAN (checks are still active in local environment and when using GitHub action checks)
• add release date info to cube metadata and cube list calls
• add auto-refresh option for sqlite tables
• remove deprecated adjust_cansim_values_by_variable function

Changes from version 0.3.8

Major changes

• deprecate list_cansim_tables and serach_cansim_tables and fallback to corresponding "_cube" methods as Open Data Canada API has changed and similar functionality is available through the "_cube" methods that tie directly into StatCan APIs
• change \donttest to \dontrun in examples to exclude examples that make API calls running (and occasionally failing) on CRAN

Minor changes

• Fix issues with top level duplicate categories
• Check for expired tables in list_cansim_sqlite_cached_tables
• New auto-update feature for sqlite tables

Changes from version 0.3.9

Minor changes

• Better error handling when StatCan returns empty tables
• Add Hierarchy for Geography in sqlite tables
• Better fallback and warning messages when StatCan table categories are internally inconsistent
• Performance improvements

Changes from version 0.3.10

Major changes

• Support for new semi-wide table format, e.g. Census data releases

Minor changes

• Improvement in offline handling of sqlite tables

Changes from version 0.3.11

Major changes

• Fix bug that causes collect_and_normalize not to function on some operating systems

Changes from version 0.3.12

Minor changes

• Speed up access to cached sqlite tables
• Fix problem with get_cansim_vector_info()

Changes from version 0.3.13

Minor changes

• Better header parsing to avoid warning messages
• Fix problem with some semi-wide tables

Changes from version 0.3.14

Minor changes

• accommodate quirks in table 98-10-0017

Changes from version 0.3.15

Minor changes

• improve offline handling when StatCan servers are down
• improve metadata handling when Member ID order is mixed up in metadata
• fix problem with refreshing data in get_cansim_vectors

Changes from version 0.3.16

Minor changes

• fix problem with reading French tables released by the census division
• restore original column order after converting to factors
• convert geography column to factor if available
• fix problem with add_provincial_abbreviations that could lead to mislabelling of provinces in some cases
• improve handling of metadata, enable downloading only metadata instead of only via full table download
• fold metadata into data when accessing via vector or coordinates
• allow for cansim vectors in view_cansim_webpage to view vector information from statcan in the browser

cansim 0.4

Major changes

• add support for local caching in parquet and feather formats
• uniform interface for sqlite, parquet, and feather caching
• principled approach to column order

Minor changes

• fix problem with inconsistent type parsing of notes
• better support for french language when accessing data by vector or coordinate
• tests

cansim 0.4.1

Minor changes

• fix problem with parsing census data tables
• fix problem with converting to factors when classification codes are attached.

cansim 0.4.2

Minor changes

• ensure proper ordering of levels even if StatCan metadata is not ordered
• better error messages and information on how to disable peer checking when StatCan SSL certificates have problems
• automatically batch vector or coordinate data retrieval in case users request more than 300 series at a time

Major changes

• enable series information by table and coordinate
• generate table template and facilitate adding vector info to aid pinpointed data download
• enable downloading of data by vector and multiple coordinates in get_cansim_data_for_table_coord_periods (breaking changes with change to parameter)

cansim 0.4.3

Minor changes

• better handling of duplicated levels in metadata, ignore duplication for geography names of census tables but emit warning
• fix issue with accessing tables without footnotes

cansim 0.4.4

Minor changes

• fix a problem with metadata parsing does not work properly for table names
• make documentations more consistent wrt default langauge names
• add convenience functions for setting cache paths for data accessed via get_cansim_connection

cansim 0.5.0

Major changes

• Statistics Canada being unavailable no longer aborts with an error, timeouts, connection failures and error responses are reported with a warning and the function returns NULL
• examples that make a single lightweight API call are now \donttest{} rather than \dontrun{}
• data retrieved by vector or by table/coordinate now carries unit of measure columns
• non-breaking spaces and control characters in names returned by Statistics Canada are replaced with regular spaces so that the resulting column names can be typed

Minor changes

• fix a case_when() deprecation warning emitted by dplyr 1.2.0
• fix get_cansim_changed_tables() passing "days" to difftime() as a time zone instead of a unit
• get_cansim_connection() no longer fails when the release date of a table cannot be determined
• performance improvements in metadata parsing and table template generation

cansim 0.5.1

Minor changes

• table downloads now warn about repaired member labels the same way they warn about repaired column names, so every download path reports non-breaking spaces and control characters in the data Statistics Canada publishes exactly once. The warning is silenced by the same options(cansim.suppress_repair_warnings=TRUE)
• warnings are no longer hard-wrapped to a guessed console width, each sentence starts on its own line and the terminal wraps the rest
• the vignettes on listing tables, retrieving vectors and working with hierarchies ship with the package again. They had been excluded from the CRAN build since 2018 and were only reachable on the package website. All vignettes evaluate their code only when the COMPILE_VIG environment variable is set, so building them on CRAN makes no network requests