row's tract_geoid, a district row's school_code) are left out."> Skip to contents

Get a dataset's column dictionary

Source: R/describe.R
gcd_columns.Rd

The columns of a dataset, lookup table or geometry dataset as a tidy table: what each column means, its type, its unit and, for metrics, whether it is a numerator or denominator. This is the place to check "what does pct_proficient_learner_or_above mean, and is it 0-1?".

The dictionary lists every column a dataset can return. Which ones a given gcd_rows() call returns also depends on its detail and columns: code columns that would be empty on every row (a county row's tract_geoid, a district row's school_code) are left out.

Usage

gcd_columns(name, labels = TRUE)

Arguments

name

A dataset, lookup table or geometry dataset name, such as "graduation_rate_4_year_cohort", "schools" or "school_attendance_zones". Names are unique across all three kinds.

labels

TRUE (default) also lists the name columns that gcd_rows() joins in by default (district_name, county_name, demographic_label, ...), each right after its code, with role "label". FALSE lists the dataset's own columns only, matching gcd_rows(labels = FALSE). Labels come only with datasets; lookup tables and geometry datasets ignore this argument.

Value

A tibble, one row per column, with columns:

  • column: the column name.

  • label: a short display name.

  • type: "integer", "number", "string", "boolean" or "date", which gcd_rows() maps to integer, double, character, logical and Date.

  • role: "year", a foreign key ("fk_district", "fk_school", ...), "categorical", "metric" or "label" (a joined name column) for datasets; "key" or "attribute" for lookup tables.

  • label_of: for a "label" column, the code column it names ("district_code", "demographic", ...); otherwise NA.

  • unit: "count", "proportion" (0-1 scale), a rate unit, ...

  • is_key_metric: logical, TRUE for the dataset's headline metric.

  • metric_component: "numerator" or "denominator" for the counts a rate is built from.

  • nullable: logical.

  • valid_values: list-column of a categorical column's values.

  • description: the full definition.

  • null_meaning: what a missing value means in this column.

Fields that don't apply (labels and units for lookup tables and joined name columns, most fields for geometry datasets) are NA. A joined name column's description and nullable come from its lookup table; see gcd_dimension().

See also

gcd_describe() for the whole schema.

Other describe a dataset: gcd_contract(), gcd_describe()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive()
gcd_columns("graduation_rate_4_year_cohort")
gcd_columns("graduation_rate_4_year_cohort", labels = FALSE)
gcd_columns("schools")
}