Skip to contents

# REDCapCAST package

REDCap Castellated data handling when using repeated instruments.

This package is a fork of pegeler/REDCapRITS. The REDCapRITS represents great and extensive work to handle castellated REDCap data in different programming languages. This fork is purely minded on R usage and includes a few implementations of the main `REDCap_split` function.

The main goal for this project was to allow for a “minimal data” approach by allowing to filter records, instruments and variables in the export to only download data needed. I think this approach is desireable for handling sensitive, clinical data. No similar functionality is available from similar tools (like `REDCapR` or `REDCapTidieR`). Please refer to REDCap-Tools for other great tools.

## Use and immprovements

This package is primarily relevant for working with longitudinal projects and/or projects using repeated instruments. Here is just a short descirption of the main functions:

- `REDcap_split()`: Works largely as the original `REDCapRITS::REDCap_split()`. It takes a REDCap dataset and metadata (data dictionary) to split the data set into a list of dataframes of instruments.

- `read_redcap_tables()`: wraps the use of `REDCapR::redcap_read()` with `REDCap_split()` to ease the export of REDCap data.

- `redcap_wider()`: pivots each data frame with repeated instruments to a wide format utilizing the `tidyr::pivot_wider()` from the tidyverse.

- `easy_redcap()`: combines secure API key storage with the `keyring`-package, focused data retrieval and optional widening. This is the recommended approach for easy data access and analysis.

Compared to the original `REDCapRITS`, all matching functions are improved to accept column naming of REDCap data from manual download or API export.

## Future

The plan with this package is to be bundled with a Handbook on working with REDCap from R. I plan to also include functionality to assist in casting (yes, pun intended) the initial REDCap database.

## Installation

The package is available on CRAN. Install the latest version:

    install.packages("REDCapCAST")

Install the latest version directly from GitHub:

    remotes::install_github("agdamsbo/REDCapCAST")

## Links

- View on CRAN
- Browse source code
- Report a bug

## License

- Full license
- GPL (>= 3)

## Citation

- Citing REDCapCAST

## Developers

- Andreas Gammelgaard Damsbo
  Author, maintainer
- Paul Egeler
  Author

## Dev status