REDCapCAST package

REDCap database casting and handling of castellated data when using repeated instruments and longitudinal projects.

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.

THis package is very much to be seen as an attempt at a REDCap-R foundry for handling both the transition from dataset/variable list to database and the other way, from REDCap database to a tidy dataset. The goal was also 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.

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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")