News

Opal 2.8 Released

We are pleased to announce that Opal 2.8 is now available. Opal is OBiBa’s core database application for biobanks.

R integration

This release is the continuation of version 2.7: the support of time series and longitudinal data in R has been improved (one line per event occurrence in the assigned data frame).

Opal will also rely on tidyverse , a collection of R packages that follow the R for Data Science recommendations, to provide the following functionalities:

• import/export of data in SAS, SPSS or Stata format, by using the R package haven ,
• import of R data frames (more specifically tibble data frames) as tables in Opal, allowing to perform data cleansing, derivation and harmonization in R.

This Opal server release is to be used in combination with the latest Opal R server package, that will install on the server side the required R and system packages:

• tidyverse for the previously mentioned functionalities,
• rmarkdown along with pandoc for generating reports in PDF format.

On the client side, the latest release of the opal R package will give access to the tidyverse related functionalities and will also allow full management of files in Opal (upload, download, create directory, move, copy etc.).

View join tables

This release of Opal improves the join of tables in a view:

• the entities of a "inner" join table will not be added to the set of entities of the view, introducing a new way to specify the entities of a view,
• the join tables can be ordered, affecting the order of the value sequences when a variable is defined in several of these tables.

This presentation explains the new features:

See Opal documentation for installation and operation instructions.