bnmr is a wrapper for httr to access BNM (Malaysia’s central bank)’s recently released API. I wrote this to practice writing R packages, with lots of help from the R Packages book.
Using bnmr is really simple, e.g. to get interest rate data in January 2019:
interest_rate(year = 2019, month = 1)Exception handling
I appreciate Daniel’s assistance in adding some exception handling to the base_rate() function.
I realised how little I know about exception handling in R while writing this package. Specifically, I learned along the way that you should use NULL for optional arguments instead of missing().
Vectorise
The BNM API allows the user to access some variables with daily measures. Ideally, bnmr functions should be vectorised, so that I could simply call interest_rate(year = 2019) and obtain interest rates throughout 2019. However, the daily API endpoints only have three options - do not specify anything, specify date, or specify year/month combination. To obtain interest rates in a given year, you would have to make the following GET requests:
- GET interest-rate/year/2019/month/1
- GET interest-rate/year/2019/month/2
- GET interest-rate/year/2019/month/3
- GET interest-rate/year/2019/month/4
Right now interest_rate(year = 2019) works. The API seems to have a very low request limit. After a few attempts I run into a HTTP 429 error.
I sloppily included some preliminary vectorisation code in opr(), which returns the overnight policy rate. However, place too many simultaneous API calls and the API will stop responding. Right now, I add a short time stop in between calls.
Moving forward, I’ll be working on exposing errors within vectorised operations.
Returning tidy data
Right now the functions in this package sometimes return lists, and sometimes data frames, in accordance with jsonlite’s simplifying rules. I do not just want to return a tibble - the data should be returned in a tidy format. Currently I’m performing the reshaping using tidyr::gather() and tidyr::spread() in the renminbi_tbl() function.
pkgdown and documentation
pkgdown makes it very simple to create a website for my package, which runs on GitHub Pages. Along the way, I found it very hard to write useful documentation - so the documentation, like the package, is also a work in progress.
testing
I’ve added test coverage and continuous integration with Travis using the usethis package. However, I have my reservations about testing too much in the case of bnmr - currently, if the API fails, the tests necessarily fail. As I’m concerned that too much testing may cause the API to reject calls, I’m currently using the in-documentation examples as my test mechanism.
Interested?
If you want to try out bnmr, you’ll need the devtools package. Run the following code:
devtools::install_github("philip-khor/bnmr")Alternately, use pak:
pak::pkg_install("philip-khor/bnmr")