Version 1.1 of the archivist package reached CRAN few days ago.
This package supports operations on disk based repository of R objects. It makes the storing, restoring and searching for an R objects easy (searching with the use of information). Want to share your object with article reviewers or collaborators? This package should help.
We’ve created some vignettes to present core use-cases. Here is one of them.

Lazy load with archivist

by Marcin Kosiński

Too big .Rdata file causing problems? Interested in few objects from a huge .Rdata file? Regular load() into Global Environment takes too long or crashes R session? Want to load or copy an object with unknown name? Maintaing environment with thousands of objects became perplexing and troublesome?

library(devtools)
if (!require(archivist)){
  install_github("archivist", "pbiecek")
  require(archivist)
  }
library(tools)

If stacked with any of the above applies, this use case is a must read for you.

The archivist package is a great solution that helps administer, archive and restore your artifacts created in R package.

Combining archivist and lazy load may be miraculous

If your .RData file is too big and you do not need or do not want to load the whole of it, you can simply convert the .RData file into a lazy-load database which serializes each entry separately and creates an index. The nice thing is that the loading will be on-demand.

# convert .RData -> .rdb/.rdx
lazyLoad = local({load("Huge.RData"); 
                  environment()})
tools:::makeLazyLoadDB(lazyLoad, "Huge")

Loading the database then only loads the index but not the contents. The contents are loaded as they are used.

lazyLoad("Huge")
objNames <- ls() #232 objects

Now you can create your own local archivist-like Repository which will make maintainig artifacts as easy as possible.

DIRectory <- getwd()
createEmptyRepo( DIRectory )

Then objects from the Huge.RData file may be archived into Repository created in DIRectory directory. The attribute tags (see Tags) specified as realName is added to every artifact before the saveToRepo() call, in order to remember its name in the Repository.

lapply( as.list(objNames), function(x){
  y <- get( x, envir = lazyLoad )
  attr(y, "tags") <- paste0("realName: ", x)
  saveToRepo( y, repoDir = DIRectory )} )

Now if you are interested in a specific artifact but the only thing you remember about it is its class was data.frame and its name started with letters ir then it is possible to search for that artifact using the searchInLocalRepo() function.

hashes1 <- searchInLocalRepo( "class:data.frame", DIRectory)
hashes2 <- searchInLocalRepo( "realName: ir", DIRectory, 
                               fixed = FALSE)

As a result we got md5hashes of artifacts which class was data.frame (hashes1) and md5hashes of artifacts which names (stored in tag named realName) starts with ir. Now we can proceed with an intersection on those two vectors of characters.

(hash <- intersect(hashes1, hashes2))
 
## [1] "32ac7871f2b4875c9122a7d9f339f78b"

After we got one md5hash corresponding to the artfiact we are interested in, we can load it using the loadFromLocalRepo() function.

myData <- loadFromLocalRepo( hash, DIRectory, value = TRUE )
summary(myData[,-5])
 
##  Sepal.Length   Sepal.Width    Petal.Length   Petal.Width 
## Min.   :4.30   Min.   :2.00   Min.   :1.00   Min.   :0.1  
## 1st Qu.:5.10   1st Qu.:2.80   1st Qu.:1.60   1st Qu.:0.3  
## Median :5.80   Median :3.00   Median :4.35   Median :1.3  
## Mean   :5.84   Mean   :3.06   Mean   :3.76   Mean   :1.2  
## 3rd Qu.:6.40   3rd Qu.:3.30   3rd Qu.:5.10   3rd Qu.:1.8  
## Max.   :7.90   Max.   :4.40   Max.   :6.90   Max.   :2.5

One can always check the realName tag of that artifact with the getTagsLocal() function.

getTagsLocal(hash, DIRectory, "realName")
 
##[1] "realName: iris"

If only specific artifacts from previously created Repository in DIRectory directory are needed in future, they may be copied to a new Repository in new directory. New, smaller Repository will use less memory and may be easier to send to contributors when working in groups. Here is an example of copying artifacts only from selected classes. Because DIRectory2 directory did not exist, the parameter force=TRUE was needed to force creating empty Repository. Vector hashesR contains md5hashes or artifacts that are related to other artifacts, which mean they are datasets used to compute other artifacts. The special parameter fixed = TRUE specifies to search in tags that start with letters relation.

hashes <- unlist(sapply(c("class:coxph", "class:function",
                   "class:data.frame"), searchInLocalRepo, 
                 repoDir = DIRectory))
hashesR <- searchInLocalRepo( "relation", 
              repoDir = DIRectory, fixed = FALSE)
DIRectory2 <- (paste0( DIRectory, "/ex"))
createEmptyRepo( DIRectory2, force = TRUE )
copyLocalRepo( DIRectory, DIRectory2, 
               c( hashes, hashesR ) )

You can even tar your Repository with tarLocalRepo() function and send it to anybody you want.

tarLocalRepo( DIRectory2 )

You can check the summary of Repository using the summaryLocalRepo() function. As you can see, some of the coxph artifacts have an addtional class. There are also 8 datasets. Those are artifacts needed to compute other artifacts and archived additionaly in the saveToRepo() call with default parameter archiveData = TRUE.

summaryLocalRepo( DIRectory2 )
 
## Number of archived artifacts in the Repository:  81 
## Number of archived datasets in the Repository:  11 
## Number of various classes archived in the Repository: 
##              Number
## data.frame      51
## function        19
## coxph           11
## coxph.null       1
## coxph.penal      4
## Saves per day in the Repository: 
##             Saves
## 2014-09-22    92

When Repository is no longer necessary we may simply delete it with deleteRepo() function.

deleteRepo( DIRectory )
deleteRepo( DIRectory2 )