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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

CDCPLACES 1.2.0

Breaking changes

  • The geography argument value 'census' has been renamed to 'tract' for clarity. Using 'census' now produces an informative error directing users to update their code.
  • The default release year is now "2025".
  • Minimum R version bumped to 4.1.0 (required for the base pipe |>).

New features

  • Added support for 2025 release year data.
  • Added support for 'place' geography (cities, towns, and CDPs) across all release years 2020–2025, including geometry and age_adjust support.
  • API endpoint URLs are now stored in an internal data frame (api_urls) rather than being hardcoded, making it easier to add future release years.
  • data-raw/DATASET.R now uses the Socrata Discovery API to programmatically discover all PLACES endpoints, replacing the manual Google Sheets approach.

Performance improvements

  • Rewrote formatted_zctas(), measure_text(), and format_query() to use SQL IN operators instead of chained LIKE/OR clauses, producing shorter and more efficient API queries.
  • Increased ZCTA and other query row limits from 50,000 to 5,000,000 to prevent silent truncation of large result sets.
  • ZCTA queries that would exceed Socrata’s URL length limit (~7,000 characters) are now automatically batched into multiple smaller requests, preventing failures when querying states with many ZCTAs (e.g., Texas with ~2,000 ZCTAs).

Bug fixes

  • Fixed operator precedence bug in check_multiples() and check_multiples_cc() where nrow(final_sum > 0) was evaluated instead of nrow(final_sum) > 0.
  • Fixed check_api() and test_check_api() crashing with $ operator is invalid for atomic vectors when a connection-level error (DNS failure, timeout) occurred instead of an HTTP response.
  • Fixed missing return() calls in check_multiples() and check_multiples_cc() that caused values to silently be lost on several code paths.
  • Fixed geography validation order so the informative 'census' deprecation message is shown instead of a generic error.
  • Fixed base URL validation so unsupported geography or release year values produce a clear error instead of a malformed API request.
  • Guarded readline() calls in check_multiples() and check_multiples_cc() with interactive() checks so the package no longer hangs in non-interactive contexts (Shiny, knitr, CI). Defaults to including all overlapping counties with a message.
  • Replaced hardcoded column indices (places_out[8:11]) in the ZCTA path with named column references, preventing incorrect conversions if the API schema changes.
  • Fixed typo in cat argument message (“overrideen” → “overridden”).
  • Fixed geometry = TRUE using 2010 Census shapefiles for 2024+ release data. PLACES switched to 2020 Census geographies starting with the 2024 release, so tract and ZCTA GEOIDs no longer matched. Geometry vintage is now selected based on the release year.
  • Fixed county filter using toupper() which caused a case-sensitive mismatch with the API’s title-case locationname values. Added to_title_case() helper to normalize county names regardless of user input casing.

Testing

  • Added 23 offline unit tests for internal helpers and input validators that run on CRAN (test-helpers.R).
  • Rewrote API integration tests: replaced fragile outer if/for blocks with skip_if_api_unavailable() inside each test_that() for proper skip reporting.
  • Condensed API tests from 60 year-by-combination tests to 15 targeted tests with deeper assertions (column names, filter correctness, numeric types, row counts).
  • Added test coverage for county, age_adjust, cat, get_dictionary(), ZCTA geography, and graceful no-internet failure.
  • Removed Sys.sleep(10) calls and duplicate test blocks.

Other changes

  • Added \dontrun{} wrappers to examples.
  • Removed dead code: unused stop_quietly(), firstup(), and commented-out httr references.
  • Cleaned up stale entries in globalVariables().
  • Fixed documentation: @param measure now correctly says “multiple measures” instead of “multiple states”; parse_request() docstring updated from httr2 to curl.

CDCPLACES 1.1.10

CRAN release: 2025-05-22

  • Increment version for CRAN resubmission.
  • Added skip_on_cran() to all test cases.
  • Added \dontrun{} to examples.
  • Removed problematic CDC URL from documentation.
  • Updated minimum R version to 4.1.0 in DESCRIPTION.

CDCPLACES 1.1.9

CRAN release: 2025-02-10

  • Edits the logic of check_api to stop the main function and return a null value if the api is unable to be reached.
  • Fixes a typo in test-get_places.R.

CDCPLACES 1.1.8

CRAN release: 2024-09-18

  • Add the newest release year (2024), updating the API’s base URL.
  • Added two new arguments: cat to query a specific category of measures and age_adjust to return only the age adjusted rates if set to TRUE.

CDCPLACES 1.1.7

CRAN release: 2024-08-26

  • Removed other unnecessary dependencies to improve performance.
  • Fixes a bug from 1.1.6 related to overlapping counties when querying census tracts/counties.

CDCPLACES 1.1.6

CRAN release: 2024-07-28

  • Added functionality to query ZCTA-level data. This is available by setting the ‘geography’ argument to ‘zcta’.
  • Added a mechanism to check for overlapping county names. This is useful for querying all levels of data.
  • Changed the dependency used to parse JSON data, improving the performance of querying data.

CDCPLACES 1.1.5

CRAN release: 2024-03-14

  • Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.
  • Added argument ‘geometry’ to return sf data frame with shapefile for requested geography.
  • Added argument ‘county’ to filter query results by county name.
  • Argument ‘geo’ has been changed to ‘geography’ for clarity.

CDCPLACES 1.1.4

CRAN release: 2024-01-24

  • Updated version accepted to CRAN January 24, 2024.
  • Replaced ‘get_vars’ with ‘get_dictionary’. This new arguement returns a data frame of all variable availability across all years of PLACES data.

CDCPLACES 1.1.1

CRAN release: 2023-12-20

  • Initial version of CDCPLACES published to CRAN December 23, 2023.
  • Included base functions ‘get_vars’ and ‘get_places’.