2 min read

Testing an R package's interactive graphs

2014-08-01

I’ve been working on an R package, R/qtlcharts, with D3-based interactive graphs for quantitative trait locus mapping experiments.

Testing the interactive charts it produces is a bit of a pain. It seems like I pretty much have to just open a series of examples in a web browser and tab through them manually, checking that they look okay, that the interactions seem to work, and that they’re not giving any sort of errors.

But if I want to post the package to CRAN, it seems (from the CRAN policy) that the examples in the .Rd files shouldn’t be opening a web browser. Thus, I need to surround the example code with \dontrun{}.

But I was using those examples, and R CMD check, to open the series of examples for manual checking.

So, what I’ve decided to do:

  • Include examples opening a browser, but within \dontrun{} so the browser isn’t opened in R CMD check.

  • Also include examples that don’t open the browser, within \dontshow{}, so that R CMD check will at least check the basics.

  • Write a ruby script that pulls out all of the examples from the .Rd files, stripping off the \dontrun{} and \dontshow{} and pasting it all into a .R file.

  • Periodically run R CMD BATCH on that set of examples, to do the manual checking of the interactive graphs.

This will always be a bit of a pain, but with this approach I can do my manual testing in a straightforward way and still fulfill the CRAN policies.

Update: Hadley Wickham pointed me to \donttest{}, added in R ver 2.7 (in 2008). (More value from blog + twitter!)

So I replaced my \dontrun{} bits with \donttest{}. And I can use devtools::run_examples() to run all of the examples, for my manual checks.