Diving Deeper: Understanding REDCapTidieR Data Tibbles

The Block Matrix

In the Getting Started vignette, we stated that importing records from complex REDCap projects via the REDCap API can be ugly. In this section we will describe what we mean by this in more precise language.

The REDCapR::redcap_read_oneshot() function pulls data from a REDCap project via the REDCap API and provides it to the R environment without performing much processing. It returns a list with an element named data that contains all of the data of the project as a single data frame.

Below, we use this function to import data from the Superhero REDCap database, which contains a nonrepeating instrument heroes_information and a repeating instrument super_hero_powers. We use rmarkdown::paged_table() to allow you to explore this large data frame in the browser.

superheroes_token <- "123456789ABCDEF123456789ABCDEF04"
redcap_uri <- "https://my.institution.edu/redcap/api/"

superheroes_ugly <- REDCapR::redcap_read_oneshot(redcap_uri, superheroes_token)$data

superheroes_ugly |>
  rmarkdown::paged_table()