RQDAassist

{RQDA}, a powerful computer-aided qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) package, can be slightly challenging to install. This is particularly so for researchers who are not well-versed in managing R’s tool sets and software extensions.

Upon the release of R 4.0, {RQDA} was archived due to various changes in the dependency ecosystem. The package remains useful to many but installing it through the regular pathway i.e. install.packages will not be available until the issues that led to its archiving are resolved.

This package was inspired by an initial script that was written to provide installation help to RQDA users who still depend on it for their work.

Installation

For obvious reasons, this package cannot be published on CRAN. It can be installed from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("BroVic/RQDAassist")

Usage

Installing RQDA

To install {RQDA}, simply run this line of code:

RQDAassist::install()

Binary install

For the default installation, two of the {RQDA} dependencies, {igraph} and {RGtk2}, will be installed as binaries; the former is obtained from CRAN while the latter comes from Togaware, creators of the {Rattle} package. The rest will be built from their respective source packages.

Source install

A source installation could be the choice if the user cannot (or does not want to) install the binary from Togaware. Note that for {RGtk2}, this will take quite a while; when the installation gets to this point,

* byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading

it may appear as if the process is frozen. Kindly wait and do not interrupt the program at this point.

R and Rtools requirement

Since the introduction of UCRT-based R builds (starting from R 4.2) the RQDA dependencies cannot be built with the current R and Rtools42 (on Windows). Only R versions 4.0 to 4.1 are compatible; when these are not found on the system, RQDAassist::install will attempt to download R 4.1.3 from CRAN as well as Rtools40. This, however, will only work properly in interactive R sessions because of the need for the user to confirm installation permissions via the Windows SmartScreen technology.

Additional functionality

Although this package is useful for installing {RQDA}, there are other functions that exist to make life easier when working with {RQDA} projects. For more details, kindly consult the documentation via help(package = "RQDAassist") for an overview of the available functions.

Troubleshooting

For the RQDA installation, several steps are involved and it’s not unusual for it to fail for a number of reasons e.g. when there is poor internet access. To better identify failure points, the user can apply additional verbosity to the installation

RQDAassist::install(verbose = TRUE)

A lot of effort has been put into providing informative output when things do go wrong.

Contributions/Feedback

If you run into problems, kindly post an issue and expect a quick response. Feature requests and contributions are also welcome.