opendatarte

The goal of opendatarte is to help connect to https://data.rte-france.com and access data from its different resources API.

This package is in development.

  • The authentication mechanism is rather stable. It won’t change a lot in the future.
  • The functions to call ressources may evolve to have cleaner R API and to be easy to maintain. It may change heavily in the future.

Installation

The package is not on CRAN yet. You can installed the development version from GitHub with:

  • using install-github.me service
source("https://install-github.me/cderv/opendatarte")
  • using remotes
  • using devtools
  • using pak 
pak::pkg_install("cderv/opendatarte")

How to use

Create an application and register some API

This package is useful to connect to your application on https://data.rte-france.com. Connect to the website, create an account and add an application. You can follow the help on the website.

Once your application is created you’ll get a client_id and a secret_id. You will need them to connect to your application form R using this package.

Configure R client to authenticate

library(opendatarte)

The main fonction is datarte_auth(). The simplest way to use it is to configure your R session with some environment variable containing your secrets: RTE_API_CLIENT and RTE_API_SECRET.

To configure them you can use usethis::edit_r_environ().

You can also provide client_id and secret_id as argument directly.

datarte_auth(client_id = "xxxxxxxxxx", client_secret = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxx")

or even, for advanced use, an httr token object directly in the token argument

datarte_auth(token = "a-stored-token.rds")

All this will do the same: It will configure you current R session so that the package opendatarte knows the credentials. You can then use the API using this package without no further authentication step.

This package is also compatible with the cache mechanism from httr. You can set cache = TRUE so that token is saved to disk and will be reused in future sessions, and not just the current session.

If you want to use httr directly and not this package for accessing the data, you can

  • save the object to reuse it in httr

You can put it any calls from httr like this

httr::GET("https://httpbin.org/get", auth_rte)

The authentication will be handle to access the data

  • use the helper provided in this package. It will pass the token to the API correctly
datarte_auth()
httr::GET("https://httpbin.org/get", datarte_token())

Access data from the API using this package

There is some functions included in this package to be use with specific ressources. They aim at easing the use of the API by wrapping endpoints and query parameter.

They are all built on the same following concepts

  • In an interactive session, if several types of data are available for the same ressource, it will ask the one you want to use
  • You can provide a ressource path directly
res <- RegistreAPI("ncc_less_100_mw")
  • By default, it will use the sandbox url (see api documentation for details). Use sandbox = FALSE if needed.
res <- RegistreAPI("ncc_less_100_mw", sandbox = FALSE)
  • It will refresh your token automatically if it has expired. You can prevent that using refresh = FALSE 
res <- RegistreAPI("ncc_less_100_mw", refresh = FALSE)

The results are currently of the following structure. It is a list with 3 elements

  • res$content: The parsed json as a list
  • res$path: the ressource path from where are the data
  • res$response: The httr response object. Could be useful for advanced use.

About available resources

All the ressources are not yet available in this package. The way to expose all the ressource is not clear yet and this could evolved.

Available ressource are :

  • Unavailability Additional Information
  • Certified Capacities Registry

Advanced Usage: Getting more resources

All the function are built upon call_api that can be used with any resource path for the api documentation.

res <- call_api("unavailability_additional_information/v1/sandbox/transmission_network_unavailabilities")

Main advantage is that it will return the same type of objects are previous functions and know how to use authentication.

You can also use httr directly by using the token datarte_token() in the call to the API. You can also use any other request package, you can get the current access token with get_current_token(TRUE) to be used with any tool you prefere, according the API documentation

In the future

  • Add a mechanism to add more resources and update them
  • Add mechanism to connect also to https://opendata.reseaux-energies.fr
  • Add functions to get result as tibble and not just list from parsed json.