To do list and small note on the utility functions that make up the bridge from R to js/cpp in JASP

todo_analysis_bridge.md

New analysis bridge update

From discussions we had a few theoretical ideas:

• There should be a clear distinction between format and content: output/results formatting should in principle be done in the JSON, and the content should come from R. Ideally, in R you would not need to think about formatting of the output anymore. See point 6 of the to do list below.
• There should be a clear definition of static and dynamic: There are a few levels of how dynamic a results object is;
  • Static - the results object does not change its column names, attributes, formatting, etc. This can be formatted fully in the JSON.
  • Dynamic 1 - the results object has titles or column names or other formatting that changes based on the options entered in the UI. For the most part, this is still fully formattable in the JSON (extra columns can be entered but not returned by R, for example)
  • Dynamic 2 - the formatting and size of the table might depend on the data or levels of a factor. This cannot be done with JSON as it is not a programming language. Formatting needs to be done in R with proper default formatting -- see point 5.

To do

1. container type title key - it does not work when you specify a title key in the container type results object of the JSON: the title is not properly displayed in the output.
2. container type items key - Just like its parent results, this key should contain an array of objects, for example like so:

    {
      "name": "plots",
      "type": "container",
      "title": "Plots",
      "items": [
        {
          "name": "distPlots",
          "type": "image",
          "width": 320,
          "height": 240
        },
        {
          "name": "matrixPlot",
          "type": "image",
          "width": 500,
          "height": 500
        },
        {
          "name": "splitPlots",
          "type": "image",
          "width": 320,
          "height": 240
        }
      ]
    }

3. Non-alphabetic ordering of container items - the items should use the name key to order the contents in the order they have in the JSON, just like in the results.
4. Dynamic overTitle - currently, it is possible in the new analyses to enter an overTitle in the JSON. As an example: look at the main table of Descriptives with a factor in the
5. Dynamic column addition - some tables are dynamic and require the number of levels from the data for determining how many columns are needed. However, we will still want to output data frames for this purpose. Something like a jasp.format attribute to the jasp.data.set class needs to be developed in order for this to work, and what is now called common.R needs to be edited to accept extra columns not documented in the JSON.
6. R results without structure - In the case of static or dynamic 1 results objects, the R results should be returnable without structure. For the following results JSON:

    {
      "results": [
        {
          "name": "statsTab",
          "type": "table",
          "title": "Descriptives"
        },
        {
          "name": "freqTabs",
          "type": "table",
          "title": "Frequencies"
        },
        {
          "name": "plots",
          "type": "container",
          "title": "Plots",
          "items": [
            {
              "name": "distPlots",
              "type": "image",
              "width": 320,
              "height": 240
            },
            {
              "name": "matrixPlot",
              "type": "image",
              "width": 500,
              "height": 500
            },
            {
              "name": "splitPlots",
              "type": "image",
              "width": 320,
              "height": 240
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }

it should be possible to return results in this way:

    results <- list(
      statsTab = statsTab,
      freqTabs = freqTabs,
      distPlots = distPlots,
      matrixPlot = matrixPlot,
      splitPlots = splitPlots
    )

This way, the container logic remains within the JSON and can be edited easily.

7. common.R should be split into several well-named parts for clarity. I don't know if it's possible, but it would be nice to have a jasp-desktop\JASP-Engine\JASP\R\common subfolder for this with files like bridge.R, parsing.R, jasp.data.frame.R as needed.

Looks great! Just one thing: It looks like there is one or multiple words missing at the end of point no 4