Creating 'tibble classes'

[rafazaya]

I'm trying to normalize tabular data from various sources to ensure that from each source at least some columns are present and have the correct type, and some other assertions (for instance, weights add up to 1). Does anyone have thoughts on how to accomplish this?

Initially, I was thinking of taking an OO approach, such as creating a class, but in my mind I keep going back to wanting a 'standardized' tibble. I've had thoughts on how to handle this (maybe just make it an S3 object?) but I'm open to anything that makes sense.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[jennybryan]

I think this thread will be interesting to you:

Functions that input & output tibbles AND have a class system?

Pardon what is a novice question in a few ways, but I'm interested in use of functions that input and output tibbles and also (possibly) have a class system. My use case is a package for a type of clustering, what is called in my field Latent Profile Analysis. I noticed many beginners to this analysis found the greatest challenge to be figuring out what form the output took. My (proposed) solution was to have the main function in the package take a tibble (or a data.frame) and output a modified tibble - namely, one with the classification, or the profile to which the observation is assigned, in a new column. If this is a good idea, I'm also curious how to additionally have a class system (…