Package Conventions

Want to add a code to Seurat? This document is intended to provide a description of the expected behavior/naming conventions for functions and their parameters.

Code Style

In general, we try to follow Google's R Style Guide.

Diagnostic Output

Parameter Name

In the function definition, include a verbose parameter to allow the user to specify whether to print the output. This should take a boolean.

Printing to console

If the function is write any output to the console, there are several options to choose from to print messages. Here's what you should use and when:

• message: Should be the default, except in the cases listed below.
• cat: Use when designing a show method or any print.* S3 methods.
• warning: Function is allowed to proceed but user should be notified (higher priority notification than message)
• stop: Function should quit and print this message.
• print: Never use print

Progress Bars

Progress bars are great. If you want to add a progress bar to a function that uses:

• for loops - initialize the progress bar with:

pb <- txtProgressBar(char = '=', style = 3)

And update in each loop iteration with:

setTxtProgressBar(pb = pb, value = i)

• apply - use functions from the pbapply package.

• c++ code, use the RcppEigen package. Include the header file #include <progress.hpp> and

// [[Rcpp::depends(RcppProgress)]] in the .cpp file. In the function, create the progress bar with

Progress p(num_iterations, display_progress); 

and update with

p.increment();