Progress bar for downloads, or an initial count on how many records to expect

[dicook]

Really love this package, and the data resource! In particular it is really helpful for class exercises.

A problem that I regularly encounter, though, is that when requesting a set of occurrences, it can take some time and there is no indication of how much longer one needs to wait. It would be good to have two new tools:

(1) a function to count how many records would be downloaded (2) A progress bar indicating how much time to go

If I can carve out some time, I'll try to work out how to do this and create a pull request.

[matildastevenson]

Hi Di, thanks for raising this issue :) These are very timely suggestions, as we've recently finished work on the successor package to ALA4R, galah, and it provides both the features you've requested. The repository is here and the package site is here. galah provides a simplified and hopefully an easier to use interface to the ALA. While it's not yet on CRAN, the functions are now stable and you can download it from GitHub. The following functions in galah should meet your needs:

• ala_counts() provides a count of the number of records matching a set of filters
• ala_occurrences() provides equivalent functionality to occurrences() in ALA4R, but takes filter arguments in the same way as ala_counts()
• ala_config() allows you to specify configuration options. In particular the email argument is required for downloading occurrence data, and the verbose argument will enable a progress bar when downloading occurrence records.

We'd love feedback on galah's functions and documentation, so feel free to raise an issue in that repository if there's anything else you'd like to see!

[dicook]

Agh, we have a package called galahr already! It got taken off CRAN but we hope to get it back on. We have a gorgeous hex sticker. Is there any chance of a different name for the ALA4R 2? Happy to help brainstorm, and with sticker design

Sent from my iPhone

On 26 Mar 2021, at 9:43 am, matilda2812 @.***> wrote:

 Hi Di, thanks for raising this issue :) These are very timely suggestions, as we've recently finished work on the successor package to ALA4R, galah, and it provides both the features you've requested. The repository is here and the package site is here. galah provides a simplified and hopefully an easier to use interface to the ALA. While it's not yet on CRAN, the functions are now stable and you can download it from GitHub. The following functions in galah should meet your needs:

ala_counts() provides a count of the number of records matching a set of filters ala_occurrences() provides equivalent functionality to occurrences() in ALA4R, but takes filter arguments in the same way as ala_counts() ala_config() allows you to specify configuration options. In particular the email argument is required for downloading occurrence data, and the verbose argument will enable a progress bar when downloading occurrence records. We'd love feedback on galah's functions and documentation, so feel free to raise an issue in that repository if there's anything else you'd like to see!

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[dicook]

You’ve got a gorgeous hexsticker too! Maybe we will have to change our package name!

On 26 Mar 2021, at 9:55 am, Dianne Cook @.***> wrote:

Agh, we have a package called galahr already! It got taken off CRAN but we hope to get it back on. We have a gorgeous hex sticker. Is there any chance of a different name for the ALA4R 2? Happy to help brainstorm, and with sticker design

Sent from my iPhone

On 26 Mar 2021, at 9:43 am, matilda2812 @.***> wrote:



Hi Di, thanks for raising this issue :) These are very timely suggestions, as we've recently finished work on the successor package to ALA4R, galah, and it provides both the features you've requested. The repository is here and the package site is here. galah provides a simplified and hopefully an easier to use interface to the ALA. While it's not yet on CRAN, the functions are now stable and you can download it from GitHub. The following functions in galah should meet your needs:

• ala_counts() provides a count of the number of records matching a set of filters • ala_occurrences() provides equivalent functionality to occurrences() in ALA4R, but takes filter arguments in the same way as ala_counts() • ala_config() allows you to specify configuration options. In particular the email argument is required for downloading occurrence data, and the verbose argument will enable a progress bar when downloading occurrence records. We'd love feedback on galah's functions and documentation, so feel free to raise an issue in that repository if there's anything else you'd like to see!

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

cheers, Di

---

Dianne Cook @.***

[mjwestgate]

Hi Di - thanks for getting in touch - I hope our version of galah is meeting your needs!

Re: naming, I don't think this is a huge problem as the names are distinguishable. The two packages also focus on quite different applications, so it's unlikely that someone would routinely use both. Finally, this name came out of a poll we ran on Twitter a while back, so we've already publicly committed to it. So I guess I'd be reluctant to rename for a few reasons; but if you think it's a huge problem let us know and we can chat further.

As an alternative, maybe we should lean in to it? The ALA database is fairly high-dimensional, so it might be fun to do a blog post where we use galahr to visualise data imported using galah...or perhaps I'm overthinking this!