Management of auxiliary data in PIP workflow • pipaux

pipaux manages the auxiliary data used in the PIP workflow. It basically does two things. [1] It updates the auxiliary data and makes sure to keep it unchanged when it the raw data has not been modified. [2] it loads the data into memory.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("PIP-Technical-Team/pipaux")

library(pipaux)

Even though pipaux has more than 20 functions, most of its features can be executed by only using functions pipaux::load_aux and pipaux::update_aux, which wrappers of other measure-specific functions.

Loading data

Loading auxiliary data can be done using the function pipaux::load_aux, whose first argument is the name of the measure to be loaded. The measures available are cpi, gdp, pce, pfw, pop, and ppp.

So, loading the cpi database could be done by typing, load_aux(measure = "cpi") or pip_cpi("load").

identical(load_aux(measure = "cpi"), pip_cpi("load"))
#> [1] TRUE
identical(load_aux(measure = "ppp"), pip_ppp("load"))
#> [1] TRUE
identical(load_aux(measure = "pop"), pip_pop("load"))
#> [1] TRUE

Updating data

Updating the auxiliary data in PIP uses the same syntax as loading it. Data could be updated using the function pipaux::load_aux of any of the measure specific functions. Before each version of pipaux is released, it is verified whether there is any auxiliary database that is not up to date. So, these functions are seldom used.

# this, 
update_aux(measure = "cpi")
#> Data signature is up to date.
#> No update performed

# is equivalent to this, 
pip_cpi("update")
#> Data signature is up to date.
#> No update performed

# And this
update_aux(measure = "ppp")
#> Data signature is up to date.
#> No update performed

# is equivalent to this, 
pip_ppp("update")
#> Data signature is up to date.
#> No update performed

pipaux checks whether the hash of each database has changed and updates the data in case it has changed. If it has not changed, it notifies the user. The user can force the update by using force = TRUE as part of the arguments.