Getting Started

When you open Red-R you will see a large blank area with a tree view on the left hand side. The large blank area is the Canvas. This is where your widgets will go and where you will connect widgets together to make what is called a "schema" or "pipeline". The tree view to the left is the Widget Toolbar. This is one of the places you can find widgets to put on the Canvas. Above the Widget Toolbar is a line edit called the Search Bar. You can search for widgets using the Search Bar. You can also search for templates (explained later) and anything else in the Search Bar. Red-R links the Search Bar to the Red-R website so any text entered there that doesn’t specify a widget or a template will search the website.

To start putting widgets on the canvas you can use either the Widget Toolbar or the Search Bar to find a widget. If using the Widget Toolbar just click the widget, if using the Search Bar start typing the name of a widget and then press the return or enter key. Now you have a widget on the canvas. You can open the widget by double-clicking on it. This will open a new window which we also refer to as a Widget.

Connecting Widgets
Once you have a widget on the canvas you will quickly see that widgets don’t do much (if anything) by themselves. You will want to connect widgets to make more complex analysis pipelines. To connect widgets you need to have more than one widget so place another widget on the canvas. For an example put the “Read Files” and the “View Data Table” widgets on the canvas. To connect the widgets click inside of the white box on the edge of the Read Files widget. While holding the mouse button down, draw a line to the left white box on the View Data Table widget. Release the mouse inside of that box (we’ll call those boxes sockets from now on). Now the widgets are connected.

Widgets can have multiple input or output sockets. If more than one viable connection exists between widgets that you are connecting you will have the option of making those connections in a popup dialog. When this happens you should look at the documentation for guidance as to what connections you want to make.

Signals
Widgets share data using Signals. Each output socket sends one signal and each input socket accepts (generally) one signal. Not all widgets can connect to each other. These connections are governed by what Signals the widgets are sending and receiving. It wouldn’t make much sense to connect a widget that sent a signal that was a table to a widget that expected a specific model fit generated by a linear model widget. Red-R prevents this using a system of Signals that inherit from parent signals.

In general the user won’t be able to see signals on the Canvas. The nearest place to interact with them is through the Sockets on the Canvas Widgets. Connecting output and input sockets causes the Signals to be sent from the output widget to the input widget. The signal is sent specifically to the specified socket in multiple allowed sockets exist.

You can also make multiple connections from the same output socket. If you wanted to plot data from two columns in the table that you read in from the example above, you could connect the output socket of the Read Files widget to the input socket of the Scatterplot widget. Making this connection won’t alter the connection to the Row Filtering widget that you made from the same output.

You can see what Signals are sent from or received by widgets by mousing over their icons in the Widget Toolbar or by reading their documentation. If you aren’t sure about what connections are allowed you can put widgets on the canvas and select either their input or output sockets. Allowed connections will be highlighted in green while illegal connections will be in red.

Templates
So far we have been discussing widgets as individuals. Red-R also allows users to build templates. These are like complex machines built from smaller simpler machines. Templates can be called from the Search Bar if they are saved to the templates folder or in one of the package folders. Templates can be called multiple times in the same schema, but don’t contain any data.

If you find that there are things that you do all the time, connecting the same sets of widgets with the same settings, then you might want to make a template. Just set up the widgets that you want to use in a blank or empty schema. Set the options that you want to use in the widgets. Then move to File then Save as Template. Now you have a template that you can call whenever you want. It will put the widgets with whatever settings or connections you made on the Canvas whenever you load it.

If you think your template is really useful and you want to share it with others, then you can contact Red-R to upload the template to the website. You can also search Red-R for templates that you might be interested in and download them to use whenever you want.

Saving
Once you have done some analysis using Red-R widgets you will probably want to save your work. Just save using the File then Save or press the disk icon on the toolbar above the Canvas. This will save all of your work that you have done. All the settings of the widgets as well as underlying data and Signals is saved into the saved file. You can then send this to a collaborator who will be able to open your schema and use it just where you left off.

Be careful that you don’t send any data that you don’t want to share with your schema. If you only want to share a part of your data you should subset that part out first then reload into a new schema. Red-R can’t guarantee that your data will be confidential once you send it to someone else. To see all of the R data that will be sent with your schema you can use the RExecutor widget and type “ls()” in the Command Line then press enter or return. You can look at each of the elements from “ls()” to make sure that there isn’t anything that you don’t want to send.