expersso/gesis

R Client for GESIS Data Catalogue (DBK)

gesis's Issues

Resubmit to CRAN?

Hello,

I guess it's not a priority, given how easy it is to install packages from GitHub, but I was saddened to see that CRAN had removed your excellent package. Resubmit one day, perhaps?

(I confess I do not know if packages can be resubmitted after removal).

All the best,

François

Increase testing code coverage and add pkg to Travis

Latest version of Firefox appears out of sync with (R)Selenium

download_codebook throws an error message

First of all, I wanted to thank you for creating this great package!
I am planning on using it in a workshop I will teach and noticed that download_codebook gives the error message "Error in is.url(url) : length(url) == 1 is not TRUE"
Could it be that this is because the particular study whose codebook I wanted to download has multiple files whose names include "_cdb"?
If you want to reproduce the error, the study number is "4587".

GESIS identifiers should always be 4-digits long

Kinda related to #12.

The download_dataset function will fail if the "DOI" (the GESIS ID) is 3-digits long instead of 4-digits long, as e.g. with old Eurobarometer survey waves.

Example:

gesis::download_dataset(s = GESIS_SESSION, doi = 990, path = ".", filetype = ".dta")

This will fail unless 990 is converted to 0990 first. In fact, the same thing happens if the "DOI" / GESIS number provided by gesis is used to access the studies online:

• https://dbk.gesis.org/dbksearch/SDesc2.asp?db=E&no=990 will 404
• https://dbk.gesis.org/dbksearch/SDesc2.asp?db=E&no=0990 is the correct URL

A simple fix should be:

doi <- dplyr::if_else(doi < 1000, str_c("0", doi), as.character(doi))

I guess the issue was introduced by converting "DOIs" / GESIS IDs to integers.

Please let me know if you can reproduce the error, and I'll submit a PR.

I do not know what other functions are affected.

dbk.gesis.org is dead

dbk.gesis.org is dead. Will there be an update to the package making it work again through search.gesis.org?

download_codebook fails for files without "_cdb"

Thanks for writing this package, it's very useful!

I have noticed that not all dois have a codebook section. So, there's an error when the download_codebook() function does not find one on the Gesis website. For example download_codebook(doi = c("5876", "5913", "5689")) evaluates the first doi and then stops because doi "5913" does not have a codebook on the Gesis website (although "5689" does and should be downloaded).

However, it would be great to have some documentation/codebook for the corresponding data. One solution would be to download the questionnaire for those cases and display a warning that a questionnaire was downloaded instead of a codebook. Another would be to find/construct a codebook from another online source (like ICPSR).

Add GitHub topics

webservice-client, r-package, rstats, research-data for example ;-)

Provide explicit way to deal with stray zip files

Better than just warning the user of this in the help file.

Add additional mime type to setup_gesis. Probably also handle this in download_dataset as suggested by @fsolt (#1).

argument name doi can be misleading

download_codebook and download_dataset both have an argument called doi and the description of that argument is "The unique identifier(s) for the data set(s)". This may be misleading/confusing for users as the number that is needed here is the study number (i.e., the number that comes after "ZA" in the dataset title in the DBK). For example, the DOI for ZA4587 is 10.4232/1.13048 (as specified in the bibliographic citation for that dataset), but the "doi" required by the gesis package functions is "4587". Hence, to avoid potential confusion it might help to change the name and description of the argument. One suggestion that I can think of could be argument doi = study (or studynr) + Description = "Study number(s) for the data set(s). The number that comes after "ZA" in the DBK study title".
For consistency, this would also require changing the column name created by the get_datasets function from doi to study or studynr or whatever else is used as an argument for download_codebook and download_dataset.

Add Chrome support

Consider including a convenience wrapper

Suggested by @fsolt (#1).

Would wrap up existing functions, vectorize the downloading of data sets, and close the Selenium server. Important to avoid duplicating code.

Add ability to batch download codebooks

Suggested by @fsolt (#1).

Should probably rename browse_codebook to e.g. get_codebook, then allow options such as {"browse", "download", "url"} to give user flexibility.

download_dataset function fails: "Error in html_form(s)[[1]] : subscript out of bounds"

download_dataset(
   s = gesis_session,
   # example Eurobarometer waves
   doi = c("1036", "1037", "1320"),
   path = ".",
   filetype = ".dta"
)

Result:

Error in html_form(s)[[1]] : subscript out of bounds