The local, GitHub, Kaggle and RStudio Connect boards provide support for many popular services; however, there are many cases where you would want to share resources in your own website. For instance, data.gov, data.uis.unesco.org and data.nasa.gov are all examples of websites that contain datasets; in those cases, it can be preferable to avoid moving resources somewhere else. To support pins with websites that want to make their data available as pins, you can make use of a data.txt file to describe them with ease. You can learn more about data.txt files at datatxt.org.
In a nutshell, a data.txt file is just a YAML file that you can read and write from R with ease using the yaml package. For instance, the following data.txt file can be found under datatxt.org/data.txt to describe the famous iris and mtcars datasets:
- path: iris/data.csv
name: iris
rows: 150
cols: 5
description: This famous (Fisher's or Anderson's) iris data set gives the measurements
in centimeters of the variables sepal length and width and petal length and width,
respectively, for 50 flowers from each of 3 species of iris. The species are Iris
setosa, versicolor, and virginica.
type: table
- path: mtcars/data.csv
name: mtcars
rows: 32
cols: 11
description: The data was extracted from the 1974 Motor Trend US magazine, and comprises
fuel consumption and 10 aspects of automobile design and performance for 32 automobiles
(1973–74 models).
type: tableAs a website owner, you can choose to create a similar file and place it in your website, you do not need to place it in the root of your domain, it can be any valid URL. Once defined, you can create a read-only board using the datatxt board. For this particular example, we will reuse datatxt.org/data.txt, but you can replace that with your own domain name, website path, S3 bucket and so on.
As you would expect, board_register_datatxt() is also just a wrapper function to board_register("datatxt").
Once this board is registered, you can use pin_find() to discover pins,
# A tibble: 2 x 4
name description type board
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1 iris This famous (Fisher's or Anderson's) iris data set gives t… table txtexam…
2 mtcars The data was extracted from the 1974 Motor Trend US magazi… table txtexam…Website boards contain extended fields that go beyond the fields pins requires, to retrieve all the additional fields use extended = TRUE:
# A tibble: 2 x 8
path name rows cols description type title board
<chr> <chr> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1 iris/dat… iris 150 5 This famous (Fisher's or Anderson's) ir… table NA txtex…
2 mtcars/d… mtcars 32 11 The data was extracted from the 1974 Mo… table Motor Trend… txtex…Or pin_info() to retrieve all the information associated with a particular pin,
# Source: txtexample<mtcars> [table]
# Description: The data was extracted from the 1974 Motor Trend US magazine, and comprises fuel consumption and 10 aspects of automobile design and performance for 32 automobiles (1973–74 models).
# Extended:
# - path: mtcars/data.csv
# - rows: 32
# - cols: 11
# - title: Motor Trend Car Road TestsYou can then use pin_get() to retrieve a pin,
# A tibble: 32 x 11
mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
<dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 21 6 160 110 3.9 2.62 16.5 0 1 4 4
2 21 6 160 110 3.9 2.88 17.0 0 1 4 4
3 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.32 18.6 1 1 4 1
4 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.22 19.4 1 0 3 1
5 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.44 17.0 0 0 3 2
6 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.46 20.2 1 0 3 1
7 14.3 8 360 245 3.21 3.57 15.8 0 0 3 4
8 24.4 4 147. 62 3.69 3.19 20 1 0 4 2
9 22.8 4 141. 95 3.92 3.15 22.9 1 0 4 2
10 19.2 6 168. 123 3.92 3.44 18.3 1 0 4 4
# … with 22 more rows