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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

artoo 0.1.1

CRAN release: 2026-06-24

Initial CRAN release. artoo is a lightweight, lossless, CDISC-native reader and writer for clinical-trial datasets, built around one canonical metadata model (artoo_meta) so that conversion between any two supported formats is lossless by construction. Pure R and lightweight, with no external SAS or Java runtime.

Formats

  • Reads and writes SAS XPORT (v5 and v8), CDISC Dataset-JSON v1.1, NDJSON, Apache Parquet, and RDS. Every codec carries the full artoo_meta — labels, CDISC data types, lengths, SAS display formats, controlled-terminology references, and sort keys — so any-to-any conversion preserves the complete metadata. For Parquet the metadata rides as a metadata_json sidecar; a file written by another tool with no sidecar degrades gracefully to a bare frame rather than an error.

  • Generic read_dataset() / write_dataset() dispatch on the file extension, with read_xpt() / write_xpt() and the matching read_json(), read_ndjson(), read_parquet(), and read_rds() pairs as direct entry points. Cross-cutting encoding, checks, and created arguments flow through ....

  • Partial reads (col_select, n_max) on every reader; gzip-transparent JSON and NDJSON; multi-member SAS XPORT libraries via xpt_members() plus read_xpt(member = ).

  • Numeric fidelity is exact end to end: a decimal value is exchanged as a string at IEEE round-trip precision, integer values beyond R’s 32-bit range stay numeric rather than overflowing, and NaN / infinite values are rejected as invalid CDISC numerics. Rows are sorted in C-locale (byte) order, so a written file is deterministic across locales and matches SAS PROC SORT for ASCII keys.

  • Encodings follow the IANA and SAS standards: the readers and writers accept a charset name in either the SAS or R spelling (see artoo_encodings()), character columns are transcoded to UTF-8 and NFC-normalized on read, and the on_invalid = c("error", "replace", "ignore") policy governs invalid bytes uniformly across every writer.

Specifications

  • artoo_spec() builds the canonical metadata model from a Pinnacle 21 Excel workbook, a Define-XML 2.0 / 2.1 file, or a native artoo JSON spec. read_spec() / write_spec() dispatch on the file extension: .xlsx writes a Pinnacle 21 workbook (Define-XML to P21 is one composition), and the native JSON form is the lossless interchange that round-trips a spec identically.

  • The spec is single-standard by construction: @standard is resolved once from the explicit argument or the source, and study-level fields are canonicalized to the CDISC ODM vocabulary. Accessors include spec_standard(), spec_variables(), spec_codelists(), spec_methods(), and spec_comments().

  • set_type() returns a spec with one or more variables retyped through the CDISC vocabulary; repair_spec() retypes every variable a check_spec() run flags as fractional or out-of-range under an integer data type, so a frame the original spec would refuse coerces after one call.

Conform and check

  • apply_spec(x, spec, dataset, conformance = , na_position = ) coerces each column to its CDISC data type, orders the columns and sorts the rows by the spec’s keys, and stamps the artoo_meta. extra = c("keep", "drop") controls whether undeclared columns survive; on_coercion_loss = c("error", "keep") governs a coercion that would lose data. The pipeline never silently fabricates or drops a column: an undeclared column is reported and kept, a declared-but-absent column is reported and left absent.

  • check_spec() validates a data frame against its spec across conformance dimensions toggled by artoo_checks(); check_study() runs it over a whole study and returns one stacked findings frame; conformance() reads the findings back off a stamped frame. validate_spec() checks a spec for internal consistency against a bundled rule catalog, with no external dependency.

  • decode_column() translates coded values to or from their codelist decodes; sync_meta() reconciles a stamped frame’s metadata after manual edits.

Inspect

  • members() is the format-neutral inventory of the dataset(s) a path holds, one row per dataset, dispatched through the codec registry. columns() is the SAS PROC CONTENTS / Universal Viewer variable pane over a stamped frame, a plain data frame, or a file path. get_meta() / set_meta() read and attach the artoo_meta.

Errors

  • Every condition artoo raises carries a three-level class chain — artoo_<severity>_<kind>, artoo_<severity>, artoo_condition — so a handler can catch a specific kind, a whole severity, or every artoo condition. The data-protection conditions attach their evidence as data (cnd$variables, cnd$findings) for programmatic inspection.

Data

  • Bundled demo specs adam_spec (ADaMIG 1.1) and sdtm_spec (SDTMIG 3.1.2), built reproducibly from the official CDISC Define-XML 2.1 release examples and shipped also as Pinnacle 21 workbooks under inst/extdata/. Demo datasets come from the PHUSE Test Data Factory; the constructor tables cdisc_adam_datasets / cdisc_adam_variables, cdisc_sdtm_datasets / cdisc_sdtm_variables, and the shared cdisc_codelists build a spec by hand. Every bundled dataset conforms to its bundled spec, gated at build and test time.

Documentation

  • An introductory vignette("artoo") plus task-oriented web articles (specifications; conform and validate; formats and lossless conversion; recipes), and a pkgdown reference site.