combineStudies {OmicNavigator}

Combine two or more studies

Description

Create a new OmicNavigator study by combining two or more existing study objects.

Usage

combineStudies(...)

Arguments

...

Two or more objects of class onStudy

Details

This is a convenience function to quickly and conveniently combine studies. However, it is naive, and you will likely need to edit the new study after combining. When there are conflicting elements (e.g. different study names or different maintainers), then the value for the latter study is kept. As a concrete example, if you combined 5 studies, the name of the combined study would be the name of the 5th study.

The behavior is more complex for study elements that are nested lists of data frames (e.g. results). If the 5 studies included a results table for the same modelID/testID combination, then only the results from the 5th study would be retained. However, if they each defined a different modelID, then the results for all 5 modelIDs would be included in the combined study. Please note that you should be extra cautious in the situation where the studies have the same modelID/testID combination. Ideally they should all have the same column names. Since a data frame is technically a list, the workhorse function modifyList will retain any uniquely named columns from earlier studies along with the columns from the final study.

Note that as a shortcut you can also combine studies using the S3 method c.

If a study you would like to combine is already installed, you can convert it to a study object by importing it with importStudy.

Value

Returns a new combined OmicNavigator study object, which is a named nested list with class onStudy

See Also

createStudy, importStudy

Examples

# Define threee study objects
studyOne <- createStudy(name = "One",
                        description = "First study",
                        studyMeta = list(metafield1 = "metavalue1"))

studyTwo <- createStudy(name = "Two",
                        description = "Second study",
                        maintainer = "The Maintainer",
                        studyMeta = list(metafield2 = "metavalue2"))

studyThree <- createStudy(name = "Three",
                          description = "Third study",
                          studyMeta = list(metafield3 = "metavalue3"))

# Combine the three studies
combineStudies(studyOne, studyTwo, studyThree)

# Equivalently, can use c()
c(studyOne, studyTwo, studyThree)