Getting a column with a list and merging with the others in R - With fbRads

Question

I'm using the fb_insightsfrom the package fbRads like this: (I use more metrics in my real problem)

fb_campaigns <- rbindlist(lapply(l, function(l) cbind(Campaign = l$campaign_name, rbindlist(l$actions))))

Oh, and I get some warnings (I know I'm doing something wrong, but can't solve it):

Warning messages: 1: In data.table::data.table(...) : Item 1 is of size 11 but maximum size is 104 (recycled leaving remainder of 5 items)

The result is the data frame with all the data I need (Campaign, action_type, value), but... the columns with the "action_types" and their numbers came out of order. The action data don't seem to be from the campaigns in the rows.

How can I merge the action types with the campaigns?

After I the data in the correct rows, I will use reshape to make the action_types columns with the values.

The data I get from fb Rads and I want to transform are like this:

The data I get using my code are like this (the format is OK, but not the order of the values, they are not the values for the campaigns)

Answer 1

daroczig give me the solution bellow, and seems to work fine!

## list of action types to extract
    actiontypes <- c('link_click', 'comment', 'like', 'post')

## extract actions from the data returned by the Insights API
    lactions <- unlist(lapply(l, function(x) x$actions), recursive = FALSE)

## extract fields from the actions
    library(data.table)
    lactions <- rbindlist(lapply(lactions, function(actions) {
        setnames(as.data.table(
            do.call(cbind,
                    lapply(actiontypes,
                           function(action) {
                               if (is.null(actions)) return(0)
                               value <- subset(actions, action_type == action, value)
                               if (nrow(value) == 0) return(0) else 

    return(value[[1]])
                               }))),
                actiontypes)
            }))

## Merging the dataframe with the original data and the dataframe with the actions
    fb_campaigns <- cbind(l[,c(1,4:11)],lactions))