Describe the attributes of a Web Feature Service — bcdc_describe

Describe the attributes of column of a record accessed through the Web Feature Service. This can be a useful tool to examine a layer before issuing a query with bcdc_query_geodata.

Usage

bcdc_describe_feature(record)

Arguments

record

either a bcdc_record object (from the result of bcdc_get_record()), a character string denoting the name or ID of a resource (or the URL) or a BC Geographic Warehouse (BCGW) name.

It is advised to use the permanent ID for a record or the BCGW name rather than the human-readable name to guard against future name changes of the record. If you use the human-readable name a warning will be issued once per session. You can silence these warnings altogether by setting an option: options("silence_named_get_data_warning" = TRUE) - which you can set in your .Rprofile file so the option persists across sessions.

Value

bcdc_describe_feature returns a tibble describing the attributes of a B.C. Data Catalogue record. The tibble returns the following columns:

col_name: attributes of the feature
sticky: whether a column can be separated from the record in a Web Feature Service call via the dplyr::select method
remote_col_type: class of what is return by the web feature service
local_col_type: the column class in R
column_comments: additional metadata specific to that column

Examples

# \donttest{
try(
  bcdc_describe_feature("bc-airports")
)
#> # A tibble: 42 × 5
#>    col_name            sticky remote_col_type local_col_type
#>    <chr>               <lgl>  <chr>           <chr>         
#>  1 id                  TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  2 CUSTODIAN_ORG_DESC… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  3 BUSINESS_CATEGORY_… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  4 BUSINESS_CATEGORY_… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  5 OCCUPANT_TYPE_DESC… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  6 SOURCE_DATA_ID      TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  7 SUPPLIED_SOURCE_ID… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  8 AIRPORT_NAME        TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  9 DESCRIPTION         FALSE  xsd:string      character     
#> 10 PHYSICAL_ADDRESS    FALSE  xsd:string      character     
#> # ℹ 32 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: column_comments <chr>

try(
  bcdc_describe_feature("WHSE_IMAGERY_AND_BASE_MAPS.GSR_AIRPORTS_SVW")
)
#> # A tibble: 42 × 5
#>    col_name            sticky remote_col_type local_col_type
#>    <chr>               <lgl>  <chr>           <chr>         
#>  1 id                  TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  2 CUSTODIAN_ORG_DESC… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  3 BUSINESS_CATEGORY_… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  4 BUSINESS_CATEGORY_… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  5 OCCUPANT_TYPE_DESC… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  6 SOURCE_DATA_ID      TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  7 SUPPLIED_SOURCE_ID… TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  8 AIRPORT_NAME        TRUE   xsd:string      character     
#>  9 DESCRIPTION         FALSE  xsd:string      character     
#> 10 PHYSICAL_ADDRESS    FALSE  xsd:string      character     
#> # ℹ 32 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: column_comments <chr>
# }