R Script .bat file - Adding Source before executing - r

Question

I have an 'R' file which inserts reads data from a database, does some calculations, then re-inserts data back into a table.
Before i execute the script, I run 'Source' as below..
I want to use Windows Task Scheduler to auto schedule this script to run. I am following the guide https://trinkerrstuff.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/scheduling-r-tasks-via-windows-task-scheduler/ - When creating the .BAT file it should look something like:
echo off
CMD BATCH C:\PATHNAME\RSCRIPT.R
What should i insert here to make sure it runs the 'Source' first?
In the R code i have
In the code i have:
#use a relative path to locate our common utilities file and source it
source("..//R-Utilities//Utilities.R")
# use check_install_package function from Utilities.R to install and load
packages
check_install_package("lubridate")
check_install_package("plyr")
check_install_package("dplyr")
check_install_package("dtplyr")
check_install_package("ISOweek")
check_install_package("stringi")
check_install_package("RODBC")
#give us access to the library of functions this script uses
source("CTB_functions.R")
But I need to click the source button before running my whole code, or i get an error (As below).
> #this automatically sets the working directory to be where this file is
> setwd(getSrcDirectory(function(x) {x}))
Error in setwd(getSrcDirectory(function(x) { :
cannot change working directory
>
> #use a relative path to locate our common utilities file and source it
> source("../R-Utilities/Utilities.R")
Error in file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
cannot open file '../R-Utilities/Utilities.R': No such file or directory
>
> # use check_install_package function from Utilities.R to install and load
packages
> check_install_package("lubridate")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("plyr")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("dplyr")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("dtplyr")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("ISOweek")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("stringi")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
> check_install_package("RODBC")
Error: could not find function "check_install_package"
>
> #give us access to the library of functions this script uses
> source("CTB_functions.R")
Error in file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
cannot open file 'CTB_functions.R': No such file or directory

Answer 1

Given your script, there should be no need to click the “Source” button first: in fact, it would execute your script twice.
A few things about your scripts:
CMD BATCH C:\PATHNAME\RSCRIPT.R
This is missing R in front of CMD BATCH. However, You should probably use Rscript.exe instead of R CMD BATCH. It’s a modern replacement.
source("..//R-Utilities//Utilities.R")
There’s no need for double slashes: single slashes work.
source("../R-Utilities/Utilities.R")
More fundamentally, using source in this manner can quickly become complex and error-prone due to several shortcomings (e.g circular inclusion, relative paths etc). A better way of achieving this is via the ‘box’ package, which provides a vastly improved replacement for the source function, which seems to fit your use-case very closely.
In particular, your script will probably not work: source won’t find the files R-Utilities/Utilities.R and CTB_functions.R because it searches these relative to the current working directory, not relative to the script directory. Using ‘box’ fixes this.