Official way to set/retrieve options in packages?

What would be an example of setting, saving, and re-loading an option to a
user's .Rprofile -- and would this be a no-no in a CRAN package?

--j


On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

On 01/06/2013 22:44, Anthony Damico wrote:

hope this helps..  :)

     # define an object `x`
     x <- list( "any value here" , 10 )

     # set `myoption` to that object
     options( "myoption" = x )

     # retrieve it later (perhaps within a function elsewhere in the

package)

     ( y <- getOption( myoption ) )


it's nice to name your options `mypackage.myoption` so users know what
package the option is associated with in case they type `options()`


here's the `.onLoad` function in the R survey package.  notice how the
options are only set *if* they don't already exist--

But a nicer convention is that used by most packages in R itself: if the
option is not set, the function using it assumes a suitable default.
That would make sense for all the FALSE defaults below.

Note though that this is not 'persistent': users have to set options in
their startup files (see ?Startup).   There is no official location to
store package configurations.  Users generally dislike software saving
settings in their own file space so it seems very much preferable to use
the standard R mechanisms (.Rprofile etc).

survey:::.onLoad

function (...)
{
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.lonely.psu")))
options(survey.lonely.psu = "fail")
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.ultimate.cluster")))
options(survey.ultimate.cluster = FALSE)
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.want.obsolete")))
options(survey.want.obsolete = FALSE)
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.adjust.domain.lonely")))
options(survey.adjust.domain.lonely = FALSE)
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.drop.replicates")))
options(survey.drop.replicates = TRUE)
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.multicore")))
options(survey.multicore = FALSE)
     if (is.null(getOption("survey.replicates.mse")))
options(survey.replicates.mse = FALSE)
}
<environment: namespace:survey>




On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Jonathan Greenberg <jgrn at illinois.edu
wrote:

R-helpers:

Say I'm developing a package that has a set of user-definable options

that

I would like to be persistent across R-invocations (they are saved
someplace).  Of course, I can create a little text file to be

written/read,

but I was wondering if there is an "officially sanctioned" way to do

this?

  I see there is an options() and getOptions() function, but I'm

unclear how

I would use this in my own package to create/save new options for my
particular package.  Cheers!

--j

--
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
607 South Mathews Avenue, MC 150
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007

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--
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
607 South Mathews Avenue, MC 150
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007

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