Set the role and action of one or more columns in a roles table

Ergonomic editor for the two-axis roles table returned by propose_roles(). Setting a role without an explicit action re-resolves the action to the default for the new role, the column's kind, and the mode the table was proposed for — so a re-roled column never silently carries a stale action from its previous role.

Usage

set_role(roles, cols, role = NULL, action = NULL)

Arguments

roles: A roles table from propose_roles() (possibly edited).
cols: Character vector of column names to edit. Every entry must be present in roles$col.
role: Optional single role to assign to all of cols. One of "design", "treatment", "outcome", "covariate", "date", "id", "text", "other".
action: Optional single action to assign to all of cols. One of "keep", "scramble", "alias", "drop". When NULL (the default) and role was supplied, the action is re-resolved to the default for the new role.

Value

The edited roles table.

Details

Direct edits (roles$role[roles$col == "x"] <- "outcome") remain fully supported; this helper exists because a direct role edit leaves roles$action untouched, which is occasionally what you want and frequently not.

Examples

r <- propose_roles(iris)
r <- set_role(r, "Sepal.Length", role = "outcome")
r <- set_role(r, "Species", action = "keep")
r[, c("col", "role", "action")]
#> # A tibble: 5 × 3
#>   col          role      action  
#>   <chr>        <chr>     <chr>   
#> 1 Sepal.Length outcome   scramble
#> 2 Sepal.Width  covariate scramble
#> 3 Petal.Length covariate scramble
#> 4 Petal.Width  covariate scramble
#> 5 Species      treatment keep