migrate from the deprecated Explore API v2 to v2.1. The portal flags every v2 request with an ods-explore-api-deprecation response header.
aggregate_cov_data() no longer uses the /aggregates endpoint, which was removed in v2.1 and now returns HTTP 410. Grouped queries are answered by the dataset export endpoint, so they are no longer capped at 100 groups; ungrouped queries use the records endpoint.
Behaviour changes
spatial datasets are downloaded as FlatGeobuf rather than as CSV with the geometry re-parsed from text. The geometry arrives with its coordinate reference system already set, and columns arrive typed by the portal instead of being read as character and cast afterwards. Because the FlatGeobuf export does not carry the raw geometry fields, such datasets now come back with a single geometry column and no longer with the geom and geo_point_2d text columns beside it. Set cast_types = FALSE to download the CSV instead.
every function now fails gracefully: an unreachable portal, a refused request or a malformed query yields NULL and a warning rather than an error, so a script or a knitted document degrades instead of stopping. Code that relied on an error being thrown should test the result for NULL, or turn the warning back into an error: tryCatch(get_cov_data("..."), cov_api_warning = function(w) stop(conditionMessage(w))).
get_cov_data() returns the downloaded data even when the metadata lookup behind cast_types = TRUE fails; the columns are simply left as character.
aggregate_cov_data() now returns groups whose grouping key is empty. The old /aggregates endpoint omitted these, which silently dropped records: grouping property-tax-report by tax_assessment_year, for example, hid 6,009 records that have no assessment year.
New features
get_cov_facets() lists the values a facetted field takes, with record counts, making it easier to discover what a field contains before filtering on it.
list_cov_facets() does the same for the catalogue itself, listing the themes, keywords, data owners and data teams datasets are filed under, with the number of datasets in each. Its features facet identifies the 135 datasets that carry geographic records, and so come back as sf objects.
list_cov_datasets() gained refine and exclude, so the catalogue can be filtered on those facet values, e.g. refine = "theme:Sustainability".
get_cov_data() gained order_by, refine, exclude, use_labels and timezone; aggregate_cov_data() gained order_by, refine, exclude and limit. refine and exclude accept a character vector and are sent as repeated parameters.
list_cov_datasets() gained a where argument, so the catalogue can be filtered by the portal instead of after download.
the API key is now sent as an Authorization: Apikey header instead of a query parameter, so it no longer appears in request URLs, and therefore not in server logs, proxies, or error messages.
requests that fail with HTTP 429 or a server error are retried with an exponential backoff, honouring the portal’s Retry-After header.
get_cov_rate_limit() reports the daily request quota, and the package warns once per session when fewer than 5% of the allowance remain.
get_cov_data() now returns an sf object for datasets whose only spatial field is a geo_point_2d, not just those with a geo_shape.
requests identify themselves with a VancouvR/<version> user agent.
Bug fixes
search_cov_datasets() prints its list of similarly named datasets only when the list is non-empty. It previously tested the number of columns rather than the number of rows, so a search with no near matches printed an empty tibble alongside the warning.
get_cov_data() warns about unrecognised arguments passed through ... instead of ignoring them silently.
get_cov_metadata() reads the field list from the top level of the response, where v2.1 moved it from dataset.fields. Against v2.1 the old path returned no metadata, which in turn silently disabled column type casting and sf conversion in get_cov_data().
get_cov_data() no longer fails outright when a date column cannot be parsed; it warns and returns the column as character, as was always intended.
get_cov_data() sends the documented limit export parameter instead of the undocumented rows alias, and suppresses the byte order mark that v2.1 adds to CSV exports by default.
failed requests report the portal’s error_code and message instead of printing the raw response body.
get_cov_data() no longer turns values that overflow R’s 32-bit integer range into NA. The portal’s int type is 64-bit, and assessed land values exceed it; such columns are now returned as doubles rather than silently corrupted.
get_cov_data() passes its apikey argument on to the metadata lookup behind cast_types = TRUE. That lookup previously fell back to the option, so an explicit key was ignored for it.
Minor changes
the package now uses httr2 instead of httr for its HTTP requests. httr is superseded and no longer developed. Retries, query parameter encoding and the redaction of the API key from printed requests are now handled by httr2 rather than by hand. The session cache of downloaded data is unchanged.
the warning raised by a failed request is classed, so it can be caught selectively: cov_api_warning for any failure, cov_unreachable when the portal could not be reached, and one class per status code, e.g. cov_http_404.
examples that fetch a bounded amount of data now run, rather than only being shown. The remaining \dontrun{} examples are those that download the whole catalogue or a whole dataset.
the test suite now replays recorded API responses, so it runs offline and on CRAN instead of skipping. Fixtures are refreshed by data-raw/record-fixtures.R.
dropped the urltools dependency; query parameters are now assembled by httr2, which also fixes the escaping of ODSQL expressions.
added inst/CITATION so citation("VancouvR") reports the current version.
VancouvR 0.1.10
Bug fixes
work around a malformed content-security-policy header sent by the open data portal that causes requests to fail with “Stream error in the HTTP/2 framing layer” on systems with a strict nghttp2 build. Affected requests are now automatically retried over HTTP/1.1.
VancouvR 0.1.9
CRAN release: 2026-03-04
Minor changes
better handling of cases where API does not have metadata
improved documentation of functions and vignettes
unit tests
VancouvR 0.1.8
CRAN release: 2024-04-18
Minor changes
automatically determin if a dataset has a spatial component and transform to sf object if it does
VancouvR 0.1.7
CRAN release: 2021-10-21
Minor changes
exclude examples from tests to guard against CoV API hiccups
VancouvR 0.1.6
CRAN release: 2021-07-09
Minor changes
exclude examples from tests to guard against CoV API hiccups
VancouvR 0.1.5
Minor changes
adapt to changes in format of CoV dataset list
VancouvR 0.1.4
CRAN release: 2021-06-07
Minor changes
adapt to changes in CoV property-tax-report dataset
remove vignette compilation from CRAN checks to avoid triggering CRAN issues when COV open data portal is offline
