rxref 0.4.0
New features
- Added support for retrieving active and historical RxNorm product
concepts in product discovery workflows, including
products_for_ingredients() and related search helpers.
- Added
concept_status support to allow users to request
active concepts only or active plus historical RxNorm concepts, where
supported.
- Added
exclude_products_with_ingredients(), a
product-level filtering helper for removing RxNorm products that contain
user-specified ingredients.
exclude_products_with_ingredients() supports fixed-dose
combination products represented with semicolon-delimited ingredient
names or RxCUIs, such as "atenolol; chlorthalidone".
- Added safer internal handling for historical concept verification
and lookups, reducing failures when RxNorm returns incomplete, empty, or
unexpected API responses.
Improvements
- Improved retrieval of clinical product attributes for historical
RxCUIs by attempting to recover dose form, dose form group, route,
ingredient count, and ingredient metadata when available.
- Improved route filtering workflows for products that include
historical RxNorm concepts.
- Improved fixed-dose combination formatting in
get_clinical_attributes(). Ingredient fields such as
ingredient_rxcui, ingredient_name, and
ingredient_tty now use semicolon-delimited strings instead
of pseudo-vector strings.
- Improved consistency of product-level ingredient metadata to support
cleaner downstream joins and filtering.
- Improved reuse of cached API responses in product discovery,
historical concept lookup, and clinical attribute workflows to reduce
repeated calls to the RxNorm and RxClass APIs.
- Added or improved progress reporting for longer-running product
discovery workflows, including API retrieval steps where
appropriate.
- Updated route-specific vignette example datasets so package
vignettes do not rely on live API calls during package checks.
- Updated vignette example datasets to avoid duplicated
.x / .y join columns and to use current,
singular column naming conventions.
- Updated README examples and package vignettes to reflect current
function behavior, argument names, output columns, and recommended
workflows.
- Improved internal helper functions for normalizing product
ingredient fields and handling fixed-dose combination products.
Bug fixes
- Fixed issues where historical or obsolete RxCUIs could return
incomplete clinical attributes and be unintentionally dropped from
route-filtered workflows.
- Fixed cases where historical product concepts could produce
incorrect or inflated ingredient counts.
- Fixed validation and test coverage for
concept_status
arguments.
- Fixed issues arising from incomplete or malformed historical concept
lookups.
- Fixed vignette data-generation issues that could create unexpected
NA rows in pre-built example datasets.
- Fixed CRAN submission issues related to API name formatting, web
references, and package citation handling.
Documentation
- Updated package documentation to describe active and historical
RxNorm concept support.
- Updated documentation for product discovery, clinical attribute
retrieval, route filtering, and fixed-dose combination handling.
- Updated NEWS, README, vignettes, and CRAN-facing metadata for the
0.4.0 release.
- Updated package citation handling to avoid errors when the package
is not installed.
rxref 0.3.0
- Removed the experimental
set_backend() helper.
rxref currently uses the RxNorm/RxClass APIs directly.