| setOldClass {methods} | R Documentation |
Register an old-style (a.k.a. `S3') class as a formally defined
class. The Classes argument is the character vector used as
the class attribute; in particular, if there is more than one string, old-style
class inheritance is mimiced. Registering via setOldClass
allows S3 classes to appear as slots or in method signatures.
setOldClass(Classes, where, test = FALSE)
Classes |
A character vector, giving the names for old-style
classes, as they would appear on the right side of an assignment of
the class attribute. |
where |
Where to store the class definitions, the global or top-level environment by default. (When either function is called in the source for a package, the class definitions will be included in the package's environment by default.) |
test |
flag, if TRUE, inheritance must be tested
explicitly for each object, needed if the S3 class can have a
different set of class strings, with the same first string.
See the details below. |
Each of the names will be defined as a virtual class, extending the
remaining classes in Classes, and the class
oldClass, which is the “root” of all old-style classes.
See Methods for the details of method dispatch and
inheritance. See the section Register or Convert? for
comments on the alternative of defining “real” S4 classes
rather than using setOldClass.
S3 classes have no formal definition, and some of them cannot be
represented as an ordinary combination of S4 classes and
superclasses. It is still possible to register the classes as S4
classes, but now the inheritance has to be verified for each
object, and you must call setOldClass with argument
test=TRUE.
For example, ordered factors always have the S3
class c("ordered", "factor"). This is proper behavior, and
maps simply into two S4 classes, with "ordered" extending
"factor".
But objects whose class attribute has "POSIXt" as the first
string may have either (or neither) of "POSIXct" or
"POSIXlt" as the second string. This behavior can be mapped
into S4 classes but now to evaluate is(x, "POSIXlt"), for
example, requires checking the S3 class attribute on each object.
Supplying the test=TRUE argument to setOldClass causes
an explicit test to be included in the class definitions. It's
never wrong to have this test, but since it adds significant
overhead to methods defined for the inherited classes, you should
only supply this argument if it's known that object-specific tests
are needed.
The list .OldClassesList contains the old-style classes that
are defined by the methods package. Each element of the list is an
old-style list, with multiple character strings if inheritance is
included.
Each element of the list was passed to setOldClass when
creating the methods package; therefore, these classes can be used
in setMethod calls, with the inheritance as implied by
the list.
A call to section{setOldClass} creates formal classes corresponding
to S3 classes, allows these to be used as slots in other classes or in
a signature in setMethod, and mimics the S3 inheritance.
However, all such classes are created as virtual classes, meaning that
you cannot generally create new objects from the class by calling
new, and that objects cannot be coerced automatically
from or to these classes. All these restrictions just reflect the
fact that nothing is inherently known about the “structure” of
S3 classes, or whether in fact they define a consistent set of
attributes that can be mapped into slots in a formal class definition.
If your class does in fact have a consistent structure, so that
every object from the class has the same structure, you may prefer to
take some extra time to write down a specific definition in a call to
setClass to convert the class to a fully functional
formal class. On the other hand, if the actual contents of the class
vary from one object to another, you may have to redesign most of the
software using the class, in which case converting it may not be worth
the effort. You should still register the class via
setOldClass, unless its class attribute is hopelessly unpredictable.
An S3 class has consistent structure if each object has the same set
of attributes, both the names and the classes of the attributes being
the same for every object in the class. In practice, you can convert
classes that are slightly less well behaved. If a few attributes
appear in some but not all objects, you can include these optional
attributes as slots that always appear in the objects, if you
can supply a default value that is equivalent to the attribute being
missing. Sometimes NULL can be that value: A slot (but not an
attribute) can have the value NULL. If version, for
example, was an optional attribute, the old test
is.null(attr(x,"version") for a missing version attribute could
turn into is.null(x@version) for the formal class.
The requirement that slots have a fixed class can be satisfied
indirectly as well. Slots can be specified with class
"ANY", allowing an arbitrary object. However, this eliminates
an important benefit of formal class definitions; namely, automatic
validation of objects assigned to a slot. If just a few different
classes are possible, consider using setClassUnion to
define valid objects for a slot.
setOldClass(c("mlm", "lm"))
setGeneric("dfResidual", function(model)standardGeneric("dfResidual"))
setMethod("dfResidual", "lm", function(model)model$df.residual)
## dfResidual will work on mlm objects as well as lm objects
myData <- data.frame(time = 1:10, y = (1:10)^.5)
myLm <- lm(cbind(y, y^3) ~ time, myData)
rm(myData, myLm)
removeGeneric("dfResidual")