jared
748ca4a56e
Investigating "gov search doesn't work" (#3) turned up two separate things.
THE REPORTED SYMPTOM IS ALREADY FIXED.
#3 reported `cog_gov_search("Orange")` dying in jsonlite with
`lexical error: invalid char in json text. <html> <head>`. That was fixed the
same day the issue was filed, by 8743472 "fix(manifest): actionable errors when
USCOGDATA_URL is unset or returns non-JSON" (issue filed 2026-05-27 11:30;
commit 2026-05-27). The issue was simply never closed. Verified now: injecting
an HTML manifest.json raises a typed `uscogdata_invalid_manifest` condition
naming the likely causes, with the raw parse error demoted to a footnote, and
`cog_gov_search("Orange")` returns 62 rows against the live corpus.
THE ROOT CAUSE OF THAT HTML WAS STILL LIVE -- and is what this commit fixes.
Every consumer builds locations by CONCATENATION:
manifest.R:95 paste0(url, "manifest.json")
mirror.R:48,125 paste0(url, e$path)
views.R the parquet glob
and mirror.R:104 documents the invariant outright ('url ends in "/"'). The
error messages tell users to set `"<url-or-local-path>/"`. But `.resolve_url()`
was a bare `.cfg("url")` passthrough -- the invariant was assumed everywhere and
enforced nowhere.
So a URL entered without the slash failed silently and misleadingly:
HTTPS -> ".../downloadmanifest.json"; the host answers with an HTML 404 page,
which lands in the JSON parser as EXACTLY the #3 symptom -- and the
guard then blames "login page / 404 / wrong share" when the real
cause was one missing character.
local -> ".../corpusdata/long/**/*.parquet" and a DuckDB "No files found".
Reproduced both: pointing USCOGDATA_URL at the bundled fixture without a
trailing slash gave
No files found that match ".../fixture_corpusdata/long/**/*.parquet"
Normalizing once at resolution fixes every consumer at the same time, rather
than having each call site re-derive the invariant. An empty setting passes
through untouched so manifest.R's "not configured" guard still fires instead of
the value degrading into a bare "/" filesystem root.
RED->GREEN: 4 tests added, 2 failed first (append-missing-slash, local-path
normalization); the already-correct cases (slash present, empty setting) passed
throughout and pin them against regression. Same fixture path that produced the
DuckDB error above now returns 62 rows.
Suite: FAIL 0 | WARN 0 | SKIP 0 | PASS 471 (was 463; +8 = the new tests).
uscogdata
Curated R reader for the Civilytics US Census of Governments finance corpus.
Provides unit-level financial profiles, geographic rollups, and peer comparisons with auditable provenance and built-in cross-vintage correctness. Reads the published corpus (Hive-partitioned parquet + manifest.json) directly from Nextcloud via DuckDB httpfs — no local bulk downloads required.
Status
Under active development (Phase 2 of the cog_pipeline project). See
../cog_pipeline/docs/reader-specification.md for the reader contract this
package implements.
Installation
# pak::pkg_install("gitea.civilytics.org/Civilytics/uscogdata")
Configuration
USCOGDATA_URL— corpus root URL (public Nextcloud share, trailing slash)USCOGDATA_CACHE_DIR— optional override for the manifest cache directoryUSCOGDATA_MANIFEST_TTL_SECS— optional manifest re-fetch TTL (default 3600)
Developer notes
Testing
The package ships a bundled fixture corpus at inst/extdata/fixture_corpus/ —
a 3.6 MB two-year slice (2019 + 2020) of the full corpus covering all 50
states. tests/testthat/setup.R automatically points USCOGDATA_URL at this
fixture, so the full test suite runs offline with no network dependency:
devtools::test() # uses bundled fixture, no credentials required
Releasing against the live corpus
Before cutting a release, run the test suite against the published corpus to catch any drift between the fixture and the real data:
Sys.setenv(USCOGDATA_URL = "<published-corpus-url-with-trailing-slash>")
devtools::test()
When the live-corpus run is clean, strip the fixture from the built package by
adding this line to .Rbuildignore:
^inst/extdata/fixture_corpus$
The test suite is URL-agnostic — setup.R falls back to USCOGDATA_URL when
the bundled fixture is absent, so no test code changes are needed for the
release run or after stripping the fixture.