Modify order of variables in a data dictionary — set_variable

This is a thin wrapper for using dplyr::relocate to set the order of variables in a A data dictionary object. The inputs (apart from dictionary) are named and interpreted exactly as they are in dplyr::relocate. The variables will be reordered as specified in the dictionary returned.

Usage

set_variable_order(dictionary, ..., .before = NULL, .after = NULL)

Arguments

dictionary: A data dictionary object
..., .before, .after: see relocate documentation

Details

The order of variables in the dictionary determines the order of results when indexing functions are applied, such as index_terms. Setting the order of variables to match their expected order of presentation in tables can help streamline table generation (see examples.)

Examples


dd_ordered <- as_data_dictionary(iris) |>
  set_variable_order(Species, .before = Sepal.Length) |>
  set_variable_order(ends_with("Length"), .after = Petal.Width)

set_default_dictionary(dd_ordered)

# index_terms() is using the order of variables in `dd_ordered` to
# return a dataframe sorted the same way as `dd_ordered` is. Note
# this also respects the ordering of categories within variables,
# which is not straightforward to do with the usual dplyr::arrange()

lm(Sepal.Length ~ ., data = iris) |>
  broom::tidy() |>
  dplyr::filter(term != "(Intercept)") |>
  index_terms()
#> # A tibble: 6 × 9
#>   name        level label reference term  estimate std.error statistic   p.value
#>   <chr>       <chr> <chr> <lgl>     <chr>    <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>
#> 1 Species     seto… seto… TRUE      Spec…   NA       NA          NA    NA       
#> 2 Species     vers… vers… FALSE     Spec…   -0.724    0.240      -3.01  3.06e- 3
#> 3 Species     virg… virg… FALSE     Spec…   -1.02     0.334      -3.07  2.58e- 3
#> 4 Sepal.Width NA    NA    FALSE     Sepa…    0.496    0.0861      5.76  4.87e- 8
#> 5 Petal.Width NA    NA    FALSE     Peta…   -0.315    0.151      -2.08  3.89e- 2
#> 6 Petal.Leng… NA    NA    FALSE     Peta…    0.829    0.0685     12.1   1.07e-23