Allow locking or protecting a data.table from any modifications

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#1,086 7 comments 8 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked Stack Overflow discussion and Jan Gorecki's read.only branch, especially the [.data.table implementation. Then inspect how modify-by-reference functions currently handle locking and attributes. Done means data.table objects can be protected from modification through a clearly chosen mechanism, with the relevant behavior covered by the project's tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request top request

This issue arose from Stack Overflow here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29085334/lock-or-protect-a-data-table-in-r

I would like to be able to make a data.table unmodifiable. In the comments below my question, two changes to the data.table package are proposed by other users:

  1. make modify-by-reference functions respect the lockBinding() function
  2. make modify-by-reference functions respect a "read.only" attribute. Jan Gorecki has already implemented this for [.data.table here: https://github.com/jangorecki/data.table/tree/read.only

Either solution would work for me.

Dominant language
R
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Merged PRs (30d)
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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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