Here are some notes on getting started with {targets}.

The project I am working on involves several different reports, each at least 30 pages, and each with about 20 plots and 20 tables per document.

As well as a myriad of functions, I had 7 very large R scripts doing the data munging and processing.

I thought they were well ordered, but I had to burn everything down a couple of times and it was quite nerve wracking building it back up. The thought of adding additional phases of the project to this code base made me uncomfortable. I decided I needed to learn{targets} to ensure this project can be reproducible a few years down the line.

The package comes with extensive documentation, but here are some edited highlights and explainers

If you don’t know what targets does – it keeps track of the objects you create, and the relationships between those objects. So if you have a file that feeds into a function, and the file updates, then the function needs to be run again. You don’t need to keep track of that in your head, {targets} does the work for you and produces a wonderful network plot showing the current status.

For example – here is a very zoomed out view of all my targets. It’s hard to tell, but quite a lot are now out of date – as seen by the blue colour

Here I’ve zoomed in, with particular focus on the localities target, which acts as an input to many other downstream targets.

The next time tar_make is run, the code that updates these functions will run, and everything else will be skipped. There is no way, having broken everything down into small functions, that I could track all this manually.

Note – I’m using dataframe here as a generic term for data.frame, tibble, data.table, or whatever else you might be using.

• The name of your target matters – if you have a function that returns a dataframe, and you want it to have a specific name, then that’s the name you should give your target. E.G. if you want your function to return a dataframe called ‘sales_data’, then, that’s the name of the target.

• Being specific with your target names is very important if the result of one target, e,g. a dataframe, is used as an input into another function.

• By default , a target will be saved as an .RDS file. This caused me some grief initially, because my functions (written before I knew targets) were saving the outputs as RDS files so there was a bit of double handling going on. So not only did I have badly named targets, I was saving them in an output folder, and unbeknownst to me (because I didn’t RTFM), they were also being saved elsewhere. I was then passing these .RDS filenames as names for other targets, and generally in a total mess. Don’t do that.

• Targets are automatically saved in “/targets/objects/your_target_name”. They don’t show as having an .RDS extension, but unless you specify otherwise, that’s what they will be (other file formats are availble, but .RDS works fine for me)

• If you want to track a CSV file, or spreadsheet, or perhaps you are saving a ggplot2 plot as a PNG file, then you need to specify that the target is a “file”

For example, here I’m tracking a spreadsheet which has a list of desired indicators. If the file changes in any way, then anything that depends on this will become outdated, and {targets} will know to update those parts of the pipeline

 tar_target(profile2_adult_indicators,# target name
            "./01-inputs/profile2_adultindicators.xlsx", # command
            format = "file") # target file format

• However, to be very clear, if you are producing a dataframe for use in other targets, then don’t specify that as a “file”

• You need to use the target names as arguments in any downstream funtions that depend on them

  For example, if you have a dataframe called change_over_time , another called lookup, and plot_three_solid_lines is a function that uses them both, then you probably want another target specified like this (where fig_three_solid_lines is the target name)

  tar_target(fig_three_solid_lines, # target
      plot_three_solid_lines(.df1 = change_over_time, # function as command
                            .df2 = lookup), #existing targets as inputs
             format = "file") # format of target output