Trying my first attempt as OO programming in R, I declared a S4 object, TestObject, that has two slots where one of the slots (test.df) has the permitted class of a data.frame:
library("dplyr")
library("methods")
# Declare S4 Object
setClass("TestObject",
slots = list(test.mat = "matrix",
test.df = "data.frame"))
To my surprise, when I try to assign an object of tbl_df “class”:
library("nycflights13")
class(flights)
## [1] "tbl_df" "tbl" "data.frame"
It throws an error:
test.object <- new("TestObject")
slot(test.object, "test.mat") <- matrix(rnorm(10), 5, 2)
slot(test.object, "test.df") <- flights
## Error in checkSlotAssignment(object, name, value): c("assignment of an object of class \"tbl_df\" is not valid for slot 'test.df' in an object of class \"TestObject\"; is(value, \"data.frame\") is not TRUE", "assignment of an object of class \"tbl\" is not valid for slot 'test.df' in an object of class \"TestObject\"; is(value, \"data.frame\") is not TRUE", "assignment of an object of class \"data.frame\" is not valid for slot 'test.df' in an object of class \"TestObject\"; is(value, \"data.frame\") is not TRUE")
I was under the impression that the tbl_df just wraps around a data.frame. I thought maybe I could declare the tbl_df as the permitted class for test.df:
setClass("TestObject",
slots = list(test.mat = "matrix",
test.df = "tbl_df"))
## Warning: undefined slot classes in definition of "TestObject":
## test.df(class "tbl_df")
But it doesn't appear to recognize it as a permitted class.
It seems that I would have to convert the tbl_df into a data.frame, in order for this work…
setClass("TestObject",
slots = list(test.mat = "matrix",
test.df = "data.frame"))
slot(test.object, "test.df") <- as.data.frame(flights)
## [1] "data.frame"
But doing this loses the benefits of having it as a tbl_df (e.g. print a few rows, all the columns fit on one screen, etc)
class(slot(test.object, "test.df"))
head(slot(test.object, "test.df"))
## year month day dep_time dep_delay arr_time arr_delay carrier tailnum
## 1 2013 1 1 517 2 830 11 UA N14228
## 2 2013 1 1 533 4 850 20 UA N24211
## 3 2013 1 1 542 2 923 33 AA N619AA
## 4 2013 1 1 544 -1 1004 -18 B6 N804JB
## 5 2013 1 1 554 -6 812 -25 DL N668DN
## 6 2013 1 1 554 -4 740 12 UA N39463
## flight origin dest air_time distance hour minute
## 1 1545 EWR IAH 227 1400 5 17
## 2 1714 LGA IAH 227 1416 5 33
## 3 1141 JFK MIA 160 1089 5 42
## 4 725 JFK BQN 183 1576 5 44
## 5 461 LGA ATL 116 762 5 54
## 6 1696 EWR ORD 150 719 5 54
I have a feeling I am not understanding how tbl_df (perhaps it's not a class). But, is there a way to get a tbl_df "class" to work with S4 and the data.frame permitted class?
The full code can be found here:
https://github.com/tinyheero/tbl-df-s4/blob/master/tbl-df-s4.Rmd
And corresponding html:
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/tinyheero/tbl-df-s4/blob/master/tbl-df-s4.html
R Session Details
devtools::session_info()
## Session info --------------------------------------------------------------
## setting value
## version R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
## system x86_64, darwin14.5.0
## ui X11
## language (EN)
## collate en_CA.UTF-8
## tz America/Vancouver
## date 2016-02-25
## Packages ------------------------------------------------------------------
## package * version date source
## assertthat 0.1 2013-12-06 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## DBI 0.3.1 2014-09-24 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## devtools 1.10.0 2016-01-23 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## digest 0.6.9 2016-01-08 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## dplyr * 0.4.3 2015-09-01 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## evaluate 0.8 2015-09-18 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## formatR 1.2.1 2015-09-18 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## htmltools 0.3 2015-12-29 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## knitr * 1.12.3 2016-01-22 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## magrittr 1.5 2014-11-22 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## memoise 0.2.1 2014-04-22 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## nycflights13 * 0.1 2014-07-22 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## R6 2.1.2 2016-01-26 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## Rcpp 0.12.3 2016-01-10 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## rmarkdown 0.9.5 2016-02-12 Github (rstudio/rmarkdown@b24f7e7)
## stringi 1.0-1 2015-10-22 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## stringr 1.0.0 2015-04-30 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
## yaml 2.1.13 2014-06-12 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
Many thanks in advance.
From S4s perspective it is not clear that tbl_df is really a data.frame. You can declare that relationship by using setOldClass where you have to provide the full list of class names of a tbl_df object. Doing this explains to S4 that 'tbl_df' really inherits from data.frame:
setOldClass(c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))