restatis

{restatis} is a wrapper around the RESTful APIs that provide access to the three main databases of German official statistics:

• The GENESIS database of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis),
• regionalstatistik.de which is the database of the German Länder (Regionaldatenbank),
• The database of the German 2022 Census (Zensus 2022).

Almost all functions work on either one of them, on all of them or just on a selection.

Installation

You can install the released version of {restatis} from CRAN:

install.packages("restatis")

Or install a development version of {restatis} from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("CorrelAid/restatis")

Usage

Authentication

To access each one of the APIs, you need to have an account that you can create on the homepage (see links to them above) and store your username and password for use in R with restatis::gen_auth_save() (see ?gen_auth_save for more details).

Note: The GENESIS and Zensus 2022 databases do support authentication with an API token as well. You can set the token as credential by using setting the parameter use_token = TRUE for restatis::gen_auth_save(). The token itself can be found when logging into the respective webpage with your account and by clicking on Webservice (API) (EN) or Webservice-Schnittstelle (API) (DE) in the bottom left corner. Important: Both GENESIS and Zensus 2022 databases will not let you create jobs when using API tokens to authenticate. This is why {restatis} will check your credential type once you set job = TRUE for gen_table() or gen_cube() and error in case a token is used. To enable the use of jobs, use gen_auth_save() and input your username and password (by setting use_token = FALSE).

Main features

{restatis} provides functions (prefixed with gen_) for finding, exploring, and retrieving data from the three supported APIs. See the “Basic restatis workflow” vignette for an overview of the main features of the package.

In short, there are functions divided in two main parts, searching for (meta)data and retrieving data:

Searching for (meta)data

• gen_catalogue(): Search the API’s catalogue of data
• gen_find(): Find objects related to a search term
• gen_metadata(): Find meta data to an objects
• gen_alternative_terms(): Find alternative terms to a search term
• gen_modified_data(): Find out when an object has last been modified
• gen_objects2stat(), gen_objects2var(), gen_var2stat(), gen_val2var(), gen_val2var2stat() and gen_search_vars(): Find objects, statistics, variables and values related to each other

Retrieving data

• gen_cube(): Using this function, you can download ‘cube’ objects
• gen_table(): Using this function, you can download ‘table’ objects
• gen_list_jobs() and gen_download_job(): Using this function, you can find and download previously created jobs (large tables)

Other functions

• gen_logincheck(): Perform a logincheck to test your credentials
• gen_signs(): Get a list of quality signs (special characters) found in the API’s tables
• gen_update_evas(): Manually scrape a newer version of the EVAS numbers (official statistic IDs)

Caching

{restatis} uses memoisation to cache query results. This means that if you call a function multiple times with the same input, the values returned the first time are stored and reused from the second time. Cached objects are stored in the memory and do not persist across R sessions. With version 0.3.0, we have enabled users to turn off caching, this is especially useful for working with jobs (so that the list of jobs from gen_list_jobs() won’t get cached). The caching option is set to TRUE by default and can be changed by setting options(restatis.use_cache = TRUE) (or FALSE, respectively). You can get the current state of the option by using getOption("restatis.use_cache"). Note: Memoisation is never used for the function gen_list_jobs() because there is no use-case for a cached version of the jobs list (users would always want a refreshed list of the jobs and their status on each function call).

Disclaimer

This package is in no way affiliated with the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) or the ‘Verbund Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder’. It is a simple wrapper providing R functions to access Destatis’ API. The package authors are in no way responsible for the data that can be retrieved using its functions and do not provide support for any problems arising from the APIs’ functionality itself. Conversely, support for problems related to this package is exclusively provided by the package authors. The license of this package solely applies to its source code.