Template for parametrised reporting

originally set up for reporting in multilingual settings at Institute of Nursing Science
Catherine Blatter, 2018-2020

How does it work?

section is work in progress

In general, parametrised reports¹ have usually the same structure, layout and computational background, but depending on the input of parameters some of these properties may and some always change (computational results). In our case the main change driven by the parameter ‘language’ affects the structure and some layout properties (i.e. affecting everything captured in text not in numbers). In few cases, the structure changes based on the underlying data (i.e. the parameter ‘center’ ); e.g. if a center does not have more than one unit, there is no need to add additional “per unit” results on a different page, thus this past should be omitted.

This graph provides an overview of the workflow from top to bottom. The main file to use in production is index.Rmd. Knitting index.Rmd will (when configured properly) output a file called index.pdf tailored to the center defined in params$center. While the results (i.e. the cell-content of the tables) are dependent on the center chosen, the computational code stays the same. General table formatting (e.g. kableExtra::kable() and kable_styling()) remains mostly the same, too. The process is then split based on the language-parameter: Depending on its input, formatting/styling of text in table headers changes and, expectantly, different text files used to be stitched together as the report.

The graph is a draft and should serve to support the main idea behind these reports. It is neither complete nor exclusive and feedback is welcome. More detailed information is to be found in the vignette (which is as to date not available, 2020-02-17).

Main features & how to use it

Parameter features include for now:

• center
• language (allows for reporting in several languages for same center, important for bilingual cities)
• restrict_level (if pct-agreement per answer should be restricted if less than X answers were given per group to protect respondents)

Other features include:

• logo(s) in header
• inclusion of cover pages from external pdfs
• switch from rmarkdown::pdf_document to bookdown::pdf_document2allows cross-platform editing (windows, mac and linux users) without the encoding-snafu

The easiest is to fork/clone or download this repo and start working locally. For plain workflow you can remove docs/, README.md and README.Rmd.

Disclaimer

If you find this template helpful or use it for your work, consider mentioning all contributors to this repo.

Have an idea for the better? File an issue or start a PR.

Report was setup with:

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
#> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
#> Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib
#> LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] compiler_4.0.4    magrittr_2.0.1    tools_4.0.4       htmltools_0.5.1.1
#>  [5] yaml_2.2.1        stringi_1.5.3     rmarkdown_2.7     knitr_1.31       
#>  [9] stringr_1.4.0     xfun_0.21         digest_0.6.27     rlang_0.4.10     
#> [13] evaluate_0.14

rmarkdown::pandoc_version()
#> [1] '2.12'

Acknowlegdements

Thanks to @yihui (the creator of rmarkdown/bookdown and other packages), @sharlagelfand for pointing me to bookdown in the first place & @EethB for fixing the header width.

1: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/parameterized-reports.html