← Back to all sparks
S

secuTrialR

ANALYTICS
Velocity0.0

Handling of Data from the Clinical Data Management System 'secuTrial'

A Swiss clinical-trial data reader that surfaces once every couple of years to clear check notes.

clinical-trialsdata-importcdmsr-packagemaintenance
Current state
secuTrialR reads and prepares data exports from the secuTrial clinical data management system for analysis in R. Development is sporadic and maintenance-shaped: the 2025 release bundles six pull requests covering dependency breakage, quote handling in free text fields, a generalised URL builder and CRAN check notes. Its release notes are largely merge messages and submission records rather than descriptions of what changed.
Where it's heading
The visible history has two distinct phases. The 2020 releases are a CRAN review loop — four submissions in two weeks, each note recording only the submission itself. After that the package goes quiet for years at a time, resurfacing when R or its dependencies break something. The one substantive thread is robustness against real-world export data, with the free-text quote fix as the clearest example. The 2025 release's own changelog spans 1.1.1 to 1.3.3, so several intermediate versions exist that this feed never showed.
Prediction
Expect the next release when a dependency or CRAN check forces one, since that has triggered every release since 2020; the notes give no indication of planned feature work.

Recent moves

  1. 1y ago

    Quote handling in free text and dependency fixes

    A catch-up release bundling six pull requests: fixes for breakage from newer R and dependencies, handling of double quotes inside free text variables, and a generalised build_secuTrial_url(). The free-text fix is the substantive one, since quote characters in investigator-entered fields are exactly what breaks a parser on real trial exports.

    View source ↗
  2. 3y ago

    CRAN check notes cleared

    Clears CRAN check notes, published a day after 1.1.0. The release note is a merge commit message, so nothing beyond the CRAN housekeeping can be read from it.

    View source ↗
  3. 3y ago

    Warning added for overwritten variables

    Adds a warning when a variable is overwritten and bumps the minor version. A small safety signal for users assembling datasets from exports, recorded only as a merge message.

    View source ↗
  4. 6y ago

    Fourth CRAN submission, accepted

    The fourth submission in the 2020 CRAN review loop, and the one that was accepted. The note records only the submission, so no functional change can be read from the feed.

    View source ↗
  5. 6y ago

    Third CRAN submission after review

    Third submission in the CRAN review loop, eleven days into it. The note carries no information about what was changed in response to review.

    View source ↗
  6. 6y ago

    Second CRAN submission after review

    Second submission, published under an hour after the first. As with the rest of this cluster, the release note documents the process rather than the package.

    View source ↗