R Tutorial: Optional directories

Key Takeaways

you now seen everything that you have to include but you might remember that we said there what other things that you could include like data and Phinehas there are many other components that you can include in our package the most common include data vignettes and unit tests others include compiled code such as C++ and even translations for messages in the past it was also common to include demo code although they have mostly been replaced by vignettes you will see more about tests later so we'll leave that for now but all of these can be easily incorporated into your packages with simple use functions let's start with an example of data there are a number of ways you can include data but as a simple example let's assume you want to include data for the end-user to work with data is stored in the data directory as an our data file you can call the use data function to create this our data file from an R object use data needs to know the name of the object and the location of the package if you want to create a vignette which can think of as a user guide you can use use veneer in a similar way this function will create a directory called vignettes and create a template vignette for you to edit with a name that you provide dev tools will create an R markdown template for you so if you're already familiar with our markdown there is little else you need to know dev tools will include a special header that you should leave as is that will ensure that our identifies your vignette you can write as many vignettes as you want using the use vignette function each time to create the template when you create in our package it must follow the standard structure you can't just create any directories you want or your package won't build so what does this mean for the code in our our directory there is in fact only a single rule around this you can't create subdirectories otherwise you can have as many or as few our files as you want generally you should avoid having everything in one script for a small package you might want to have one file per function with a file name reflecting the function name but as a package gets larger it's common to see similar functions grouped together personally I tend to end up somewhere in between with large functions in a file of their own and smaller utility functions drooped ever with other similar functions now it's your turn to try including some of these optional elements