R Package SSOAP

Last year, during a summer course that I gave at FGV, I taught the students how to use SOAP protocol do retrive data from Banco Central do Brasil using R. BCB has a system called SGS (Sistema Gerenciador de Séries Temporais) that has a SOAP interface.

At that time, the package SSOAP had a small bug that I contributed to fix. Today I found that my contribution was incorporated in version 0.5-5 of this package whish makes my repository at github outdated.

It took my a couple of minutes to test the new version of this package. Since I am running the last version of R, 2.14, the general procedure for install packages didn’t work.

> install.packages("SSOAP")
Warning message:
In getDependencies(pkgs, dependencies, available, lib) :
  package ‘SSOAP’ is not available (for R version 2.14.0)

I finnaly figured out how to install the last version from source using the Omegahat repository version with the command:

> install.packages("SSOAP", repos = "http://www.omegahat.org/R", 
                   dependencies = TRUE, 
                   type = "source")
trying URL 'http://www.omegahat.org/R/src/contrib/SSOAP_0.8-1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 195424 bytes (190 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 190 Kb

* installing *source* package ‘SSOAP’ ...
** R
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
Creating a new generic function for ‘help’ in package ‘SSOAP’
Warning in .NonstandardGenericTest(body(fdef), name, stdGenericBody) :
  the supplied generic function definition for toSOAP does not
  seem to call 'standardGeneric'; no methods will be dispatched!
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices ...
** testing if installed package can be loaded

* DONE (SSOAP)

The downloaded packages are in
	‘/private/var/.../downloaded_packages’

After that, I was prepared to actually test the package running the code that I created during the course (lesson 7 directory aula-07). But some changes in RCurl package requires a change in how we ask for not verify the ssl certificate. That is, I had to replace the ssl.verifypeer = FALSE argument by a list of options in the call of the function ff@functions$getValoresSeriesXML. The last version of this script is now available as a gist here:

Note that the ssl.verifypeer argument is necessary because the certificate used in BCB website is invalid! What a shame!