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OSF Tibbles

Source: R/osf_tbl.R
osf_tbl.Rd

Items retrieved from OSF are represented as osf_tbl objects, specialized data frames based on the tibble class. See below for additional details.

Details

Each row of an osf_tbl represents a single OSF entity. This could be a user, project, component, directory, or file. An osf_tbl must include the following 3 columns:

  1. name: indicates the name or title of the entity.

  2. id: the unique identifier assigned by OSF.

  3. meta: a list-column that stores the processed response returned by OSF's API. See the Meta column section below for more information.

Subclasses

osf_tbl is the parent class of 3 subclasses that are used to represent each of OSF's main entities:

  1. osf_tbl_user for users.

  2. osf_tbl_file for files and directories.

  3. osf_tbl_node for projects and components.

OSF nodes

Projects and components are both implemented as nodes on OSF. The only distinction between the two is that a project is a top-level node, and a component must have a parent node (i.e., must be a sub-component of another project or component). Because projects and components are functionally identical, osfr uses the same osf_tbl_node class to represent both.

Meta column

The meta column contains all of the information returned from OSF's API for a single entity, structured as a named list with 3 elements:

  1. attributes contains metadata about the entity (e.g., names, descriptions, tags, etc).

  2. links contains urls to API endpoints with alternative representations of the entity or actions that may be performed on the entity.

  3. relationships contains URLs to other entities with relationships to the entity (e.g., collaborators attached to a project).

This information is critical for osfr's internal functions and should not be altered by users. For even more information about these elements, see OSF's API documentation.

Acknowledgments

Our implementation of the osf_tbl class is based on dribble objects from the googledrive package.