[FEATURE] tidy exports from csv instead of API

[shannonpileggi]

Feature Request Description

You have such amazing functionality to tidy redcap data! It would be nice if there were user facing functions that could do the same for csvs exported from redcap as well.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Pain and suffering.

Additional Context

We were recently contracted for short term support for a database hosted in REDCap at an instution at which we did not have API access, and we received the data via csvs. Granting us API access was not feasible. Thank you for considering!

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[skadauke]

This would indeed be awesome but without API access and access to metadata some key information we use to slice and dice the tables is missing. We looked into this and I believe it is a hard problem. For your present use case, wouldn't it be possible to ask someone who does have API access to use REDCapTidieR to pull the data and then email you the RDS file?

library(REDCapTidieR)
data <- read_redcap(uri, token)

data |> saveRDS("data.rds")

[shannonpileggi]

No, that is not an option in this case.

I do appreciate the additional complexity not having API access generates!

[rsh52]

Shannon and I discussed this a bit today, and Stephan's right it wouldn't be possible to make a supertibble without the metadata. However, if the team you work with is able to export the data and can also export the metadata then I don't think it would be that much effort to enable accepting via files instead of the API. They would just need to go to the API Playground and export the metadata as a JSON/CSV/XML:

I also mentioned how using these interim files as a workflow opens up more opportunity for data structure changes that would be tough to debug, but I figured it was worth having a record of this use case.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Pain and suffering.

Ah, so a nice and normal experience 😆