Controlling OpenCDISC validator using R

The OpenCDISC Validator GUI writes output to a fixed location in the installation folder, a behaviour which is not acceptable in a server environment. Furthermore, on each call, the user must navigate to the location of the files to be checked. OpenCDISC does include a command line interface (CLI) which offers user control of both input and output locations but requires relatively complex commands. One solution is to use a scripting language to read the input parameters for the OpenCDISC CLI from a file and make the appropriate calls to OpenCDISC. This approach can be independent of operating system and also facilitates repeated runs. Scripting languages such as Perl or Python are well suited to such tasks but are not always available. We show that R, usually available for statistical analysis reasons, can also carry out such tasks with ease and in a manner which hides operating system level details from the programmer.