Throw an error if a BirdFlow object is malformed or incomplete.
Arguments
- x
A BirdFlow object.
- error
If TRUE throw an error if there are problems if FALSE return any problems as a data.frame.
- allow_incomplete
If TRUE allow the BirdFlow object to be missing both marginals and transitions (but not other components). This allows checking the output of
preprocess_species().
Value
If error = FALSE the function returns
a data.frame describing any errors with columns:
- problem
A character description of any problems.
- type
The problem type, either "error" or "incomplete."
Otherwise, if there are no problems a similar data.frame with no rows is returned invisibly.
Details
preprocess_species() creates a BirdFlow object that lacks both marginals
and transitions and thus can't be used to make projections.
validate_BirdFlow() tags the absence of these with the type "incomplete".
Any other missing or malformed components are tagged "error".
Since marginals can be used to calculate both distributions and transition matrices, a BirdFlow object can be complete if it has marginals; or has both transitions and distributions. Having redundancy in these three is not considered an error.
Currently metadata and species information is not checked for completeness.
Currently dead end transitions are permitted. See find_dead_ends() for
checking for those.