Data Processor for IMPACT runs (DOORMAT)

Status

Introduction

DOORMAT (Data prOcessor fOR iMpAcT) is the core R package which helps in compiling basic R functions to be able to analyze some standard outputs from the the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) model.

The IMPACT model was developed in the early 1990s to explore the long term challenges facing policymakers in reducing hunger and poverty in a sustainable fashion. The IMPACT model has been expanded and improved repeatedly to respond to increasingly complex policy questions and the state-of-the-art of modeling. See documentation of most recent update.

The goal of DOORMAT is to to be able to setup some standar functions which will help in reading the outputs from a gdx file belonging to the outputs of an IMPACT run. The package also provides a buildPackage utility which helps in compiling the packages from the IMPACT R-universe.

Installing rtools on windows machines

Rtools is a toolchain bundle used for building R packages from source (those that need compilation of C/C++ or Fortran code) and for build R itself.

Rtools can be downloaded from the RTools website

Usually, Rtools also needs to be added to the Environment Variables in windows machines. This is automatically done once you successfully install Rtools.

Setting user library

skip this part if you already have a personal R library set

you can check this by running Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER") in an R session and see if it returns a folder path you have setup as your library.

Sometimes, Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER") points to an appdata folder on windows machines. It can cause some editing privileges to be removed from inside an R environment. To make sure that packages can be successfully installed, we can manually create a folder to hold personal R libraries.

To do so, you can open a R session and paste the following:

path <- "C:/Rpackages"
if (!dir.exists(path)) {
  dir.create(path, recursive = TRUE)
  Sys.setenv(R_LIBS_USER = path)
  if(Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER") == path) cat("Personal library set to ---- ", path)
}

Adding GAMS as PATH environment variable

See https://www.gams.com/latest/docs/UG_WIN_INSTALL.html

When installing a fresh copy of GAMS or updating GAMS, you have two options to run the installer: In default or advanced mode. In the default mode, the installer will prompt you for the name of the directory in which to install GAMS. You may accept the default choice or pick another directory. Please remember: if you want to install two different versions of GAMS, they must be in separate directories.

If you choose to use the advanced mode, the installer will also ask you for a name of a start menu folder, if GAMS should be installed for all users, if the GAMS directory should be added to the PATH environment variable and which desktop icons should be created.

Installing devtools

The aim of devtools is to make package development easier by providing R functions that simplify and expedite common tasks. R Packages is a book based around this workflow.

# Install devtools from CRAN
install.packages("devtools", dependencies=TRUE)

# Or the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/devtools", dependencies=TRUE)

Additional repository

For installation of the most recent package version of IFPRI managed R packages, magclass (for array based operations), additional repositories have to be added in R:

options(repos = c(CRAN  = "https://cloud.r-project.org/",
                  PIK   = "https://rse.pik-potsdam.de/r/packages", 
                  KIRAN = "https://ifpri.r-universe.dev"))

Here,

• CRAN is the Comprehensive R Archive Network

• PIK is the repository managed by PIK in Germany

• KIRAN is the Key IMPACT R Archive Network managed by IFPRI

Installing magclass

magclass package can be installed from the pik-piam universe of packages. This package is also distributed via CRAN but is not as frequently updated. Installation of this package can be easily achieved via:

# Development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("pik-piam/magclass", dependencies=TRUE)

Installing dependencies

Installation of R package gamstransfer is required before DOORMAT can be used correctly.

GAMS Transfer R (gamstransfer) depends on packages R6, R.utils, and Rcpp. These can be manually installed if needed by running the following commands in an R session:

install.packages("R6", dependencies=TRUE)
install.packages("R.utils", dependencies=TRUE)
install.packages("Rcpp", dependencies=TRUE)

Installation of gamstransfer

Starting with release of GAMS 41.1.0, the standard R library for reading gdx files in R using the package gdxrrw is deprecated.

As gdxrrw is earmarked for removal in a future release, use of “GAMS Transfer R” is recommended. GAMS Transfer is a package to maintain GAMS data outside a GAMS script in a programming language like R. GAMS Transfer’s main focus is the highly efficient transfer of data between GAMS and R, while keeping those operations as simple as possible for the user. In order to achieve this, symbol records - the actual and potentially large-scale data sets - are stored in native data structures of the corresponding programming languages (like R).

The user must download and install the latest version of GAMS in order to install GAMS Transfer R. GAMS Transfer R can then be installed from either the source package or from the binary package.

The installation from the source will install gamstransfer and all of its dependencies.

install.packages("[PathToGAMS]/apifiles/R/gamstransfer/source/gamstransfer_r.tar.gz", dependencies=TRUE)

The users can also install gamstransfer without compiling the package source code using gamstransfer binary package. The binary packages are platform dependent and the instructions for each supported platform are shown below.

On Windows

install.packages("[PathToGAMS]/apifiles/R/gamstransfer/binary/gamstransfer.zip", type="binary")

On linux

install.packages("[PathToGAMS]/apifiles/R/gamstransfer/binary/gamstransfer.tar.gz")

On macOS

install.packages("[PathToGAMS]/apifiles/R/gamstransfer/binary/gamstransfer.tgz", type="binary")

See documentation on GAMS website

Installing DOORMAT

Once gasmtransfer is installed, you can install the latest version of DOORMAT from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("IFPRI/DOORMAT", dependencies=TRUE)

Questions / Problems

In case of questions / problems please contact Abhijeet Mishra ([email protected])