Passing many values to an API using R - r

Question

I wish to scale my working API query to query many IDs and to store this in a nice rectangular data frame.
I need some help understanding how I can scale my code to take many input variables and then how to store them.
My working code is as follows:
pacman::p_load(tidyverse,httr,jsonlite,purrr)
path <- "https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/api/?"
request <- httr::GET(url = path,
query = list(version = "2.0",
number = 1154328938))
response <- content(request, as = "text", encoding = "UTF-8")
df <- jsonlite::fromJSON(response, flatten = TRUE) %>%
data.frame()
providerData <- df %>%
select(results.number,
results.basic.name,
results.basic.gender,
results.basic.credential,
results.taxonomies) %>%
unnest_wider(results.taxonomies) %>%
rename(Provider_NPI = results.number,
Provider_Name = results.basic.name,
Provider_Gender = results.basic.gender,
Provider_Credentials = results.basic.credential,
Provider_Taxonomy = desc,
Provider_State = state) %>%
select(-code,-license,-primary)
I now wish to query these 4 IDs and to store them in the same data format as the example above.
I have tried using lapply and building my own function but I don't fully understand how to create objects that store returned values.
My function looks as follows:
getNPI <- function(object) {
httr::GET(url = path,
query = list(version = "2.0",
number = object))
}
providerIDs <- c('1073666335',
'1841395357',
'1104023381',
'1477765634')
test <- lapply(providerIDs, getNPI)
I'm pretty certain I need some sort of object like a list or data frame to store the values of httr::GET but this is where I am falling down. The other piece is how to pull the appropriate values from the returned objects and to store them in a neat data frame.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

you have to add the "cleaning" steps and return a df inside your getNPI function, then you can later use do.call for "combine" all data into a "final" data frame:
Example
getNPI <- function(object) {
request <- httr::GET(url = path,
query = list(version = "2.0",
number = object))
df <- content(request, as = "text", encoding = "UTF-8") %>%
jsonlite::fromJSON(. , flatten = TRUE) %>%
data.frame()
df %>%
select(results.number,
results.basic.name,
results.basic.gender,
results.basic.credential,
results.taxonomies) %>%
unnest_wider(results.taxonomies)
# Add more selection, mutations as needed
}
test <- lapply(providerIDs, getNPI)
# Use do.call for rbind an make the final df
final_df <- do.call("rbind",test)
Hope this can help you
NOTE: In order to rbind works with do.call as expected, all the columns names has to be the same.