index.html

<p><link href="http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/markdown.css" rel="stylesheet"></link></p>

<h1>formhub.R</h1>

<p>formhub.R is a library for making reading data form <a href="http://formhub.org">formhub.org</a> into R easier.</p>
<a href="https://github.com/SEL-Columbia/formhub.R"><img style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; border: 0;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/github/ribbons/forkme_left_darkblue_121621.png" alt="Fork me on GitHub"></a>

<h2>Examples</h2>

<ul>
<li>Getting started -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.com/formhub.R/demo/Basics_of_formhub.R.html">Basics of formhub.R</a></li>
<li>Quick example -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.com/formhub.R/demo/Good_Eats_Example.html">Charting good_eats submission over time</a></li>
<li>Making maps -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.com/formhub.R/demo/Water_Points_Example.html">Making maps with North Ghana data</a></li>
<li>Quality control -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.com/formhub.R/demo/How_Long_Example.html">How long did it take to process a survey</a></li>
<li>Quality control II -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.com/formhub.R/demo/RemoveOutliers.html">A basic tutorial on removing outliers from your data</a></li>
<li>Making Readable Data -- <a href="http://SEL-Columbia.github.io/formhub.R/demo/ReadableData.html">Replacing "slugs" in data output with survey text</a></li>
</ul>

<p>For most of the examples, I use the <a href="http://ggplot2.org">ggplot2</a> library, which is an amazing data visualization library worth every minute of your time spent learning it.</p>

<h2>Installing formhub.R</h2>

<p>The package for formhub.R in R is simply called <code>formhub</code>. For now, it cannot be installed from CRAN, but using Hadley Wickam's excellent <code>devtools</code> package, you can install it directly from github. To install (or upgrade), run the following commands from your R terminal:</p>

<pre><code>install.packages('devtools') 
library(devtools)
install_github("formhub.R", username="SEL-Columbia")
library(formhub)
</code></pre>

<p>And voila! The <code>formhub</code> package is installed in your R system! You can check by running:</p>

<pre><code>help(formhubDownload)
</code></pre>

<h2>Features</h2>

<p>At the moment, it has the following features:</p>

<ul>
<li>One command download of formhub.org data -- both public and private</li>
<li>(Automatic) casting of data to the right type, based on the type of the input field in XLSform
<ul>
<li><code>select one</code> fields are converted to factors</li>
<li><code>integer</code>/<code>decimal</code> converted to numerics</li>
<li><code>date</code> fields (including <code>today</code>), and <code>datetime</code> fields (including <code>start</code> and <code>end</code>) are converted to <a href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=lubridate">lubridate</a> instants [timezone information is discarded at the moment]</li>
<li>TRUE / FALSE fields created out of <code>select multiple</code> options are converted into booleans</li>
</ul></li>
<li>removeColumns convenience function that removes columns based on matching the title with a regular expression</li>
<li>'extra-schema' over-ride. </li>
</ul>

<p>For planned features, go to the <a href="https://github.com/SEL-Columbia/formhub.R/issues">issues</a> page.</p>