importDataFromSBDF
Import Data from an SBDF File

### Description

Imports a file from the Spotfire binary data file format.

### Usage

    importDataFromSBDF(file = NULL, rowNamesCol = -1,
                       check.names = FALSE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

### Arguments

file | a character string specifying the name of the SBDF to import.
rowNamesCol | an integer denoting the column that should be used for row names. The specified column is dropped from the resulting data frame.
check.names | a logical value. If FALSE (the default), import the column names with no changes. If TRUE, convert the imported column names to legal object names by substituting periods for illegal characters such as blanks, parentheses, or commas.
stringsAsFactors | a logical value. If stringsAsFactors=TRUE, strings are converted to factors when they are imported. The default is FALSE, which imports strings as characters.

### Details

The following table shows the supported data types and how they are converted when you import from Spotfire into an R engine:

| SBDF data type | R data type
| Boolean | logical
| Integer (32 bit) | numeric
| Currency* | numeric
| LongInteger (64 bit) | numeric
| SingleReal (32-bit float) | numeric
| Real (64-bit float) | numeric
| String | character
| DateTime | POSIXct object with time zone UTC
| Date | POSIXct object with time zone UTC
| Time | POSIXct object with time zone UTC, specifying a time on the R epoch day 1/1/1970
| TimeSpan | difftime object with units secs
| Binary | raw

Most of the supported R data types are stored as data.frame columns containing atomic vectors. One exception is the raw data type, which is stored in a data.frame column as a list of raw objects and NULL values, such as data.frame(x=I(list(as.raw(1:3),as.raw(4:90),NULL))). The raw objects in such a list can have different lengths.
*Note: Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R does not support the Spotfire data type Currency natively. Any Currency value contained in an SBDF file is imported to Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R as numeric. If this numeric is then exported to an SDBF, it is converted to the Spotfire data type Real. This can result in a loss of precision for very large values.
The returned data.frame has an added attribute "SBDFImportTypes", whose value is a named string vector, where the names are the column names, and the values are the original SBDF data types of the imported columns. This vector is also returned by the function getSBDFImportTypes.
The SBDF file format can represent a set of "data table properties" associated with the whole table, as well as a set of "column properties" values associated with each table column. Imported data table properties (if any) are represented by a "SpotfireTableMetaData" attribute on the return value, and column properties for each column (if any) are represented by a "SpotfireColumnMetaData" attribute on the column elements. The value of a "SpotfireTableMetaData" or "SpotfireColumnMetaData" attribute will be a list of named elements, where each element can be one of the supported R data types that are listed above.
Value
returns the imported data as a data.frame.
See Also
exportDataToSBDF, getSBDFImportTypes
Examples

    # Import the sample data file, pima.sbdf
    pimaFile <- system.file("sample/pima.sbdf", package="SpotfireData")
    pima <- importDataFromSBDF(pimaFile)

Package SpotfireData version 6.1.5-18
Package Index