Release Notes for v6.0.1 of DataSHIELD

Focus of Release

• The major focuses of the v6.0.1 maintenance release of DataSHIELD, addressing known issues.

Changes from DataSHIELD v6.0 to v6.0.1

• Improvements to "ds.dataFrameSubset", “dataFrameSubsetDS1" and "dataFrameSubsetDS2" functions: improved argument checking and support for the "ONES" option, which will cause a vector containing "1" to be created and then used directly to select all rows when you are primarily subsetting by column.

• Improvements to “ds.dataFrame” and “ds.cbind” functions: ensures that the combining of variables in data frames that are created by those two functions maintains the actual class of each input variable.

• Improvements to "ds.names" and "namesDS" functions: improved checking that function is operation on a list object which may include objects whose primary class is something else (e.g. glm, for output from a generalized linear model) but is also a list.

• Improvements to "ds.dataFrameFill" and "dataFrameFillDS" functions: ensures that the classes of any created columns match the classes of existing columns in the other studies.

• Enhancements of build and testing system: remove reliance on "opal" and "opaladmin" packages.

Supported Versions​

• DataSHIELD v6.0.1 is supported on R3.5, R3.6 and R 4.0, and would be expected to work with intermediate versions.  At present the DataSHIELD client-side package is known to work on Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04  and Windows 10.  DataSHIELD server-side package is known to work when deployed to Opal 3.0.1 running on Ubuntu 16.04.

Code Availability

• As ever, you can see the code at a variety of places: https://cran.obiba.org/,
  or GitHub - datashield/dsBase at 6.0.1
  and GitHub - datashield/dsBaseClient at 6.0.1