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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

DeclareDesign 2.0.0

CRAN release: 2026-10-25

DeclareDesign 2.0 is a ground-up reimplementation on tidyverse primitives. The declaration syntax is unchanged; the changes below are at the edges. vignette("declaredesign2.0") gives the reasoning for each and a grep table for porting a script.

Breaking changes

  • redesign() reaches a name the design reads (a value named above the design, a designer function’s argument, or a declare_parameters() entry) and no longer a number written inside a step. redesign(design, N = 1000) over declare_model(N = 500) errors with the two ways to name the value; in 1.x it warned and returned the design unchanged.
  • declare_estimator(inquiry = ) takes the inquiry’s label as a string. Passing the inquiry step object is an error; in 1.x it linked the estimator to an inquiry called "inquiry" and returned NA estimands.
  • diagnose_design() and simulate_design() drop make_groups, add_grouping_variables, and future.seed, each with an error naming the replacement. Group with simulate_design() |> group_by() |> diagnose_design(); seed with set.seed() before the call.
  • redesign()’s first argument is .design and expand_design()’s is .designer, and both take .expand after the dots, so a parameter named expand, or d or any other prefix of design, is no longer swallowed by partial matching. expand_design() drops prefix, which named the designs it returned design_1, design_2, and so on; designs are now named by the values that distinguish them.
  • draw_data() no longer runs part of a design on supplied data; data, start, and end are gone, and passing them stops with an error naming the replacement unless the design reads a parameter by that name. Use get_estimates(design, data) to run estimators on supplied data and design[i:j] for a slice.
  • label_estimator(fn = ) and label_test(fn = ) are .method =; set_diagnosands(x = ) is design =; reshape_diagnosis() drops select and exclude.
  • compare_designs(), compare_design_code(), compare_design_summaries(), compare_design_estimates(), compare_design_inquiries(), compare_design_data(), and print_code() are defunct and say so. compare_diagnoses() stays.
  • declare_potential_outcomes() and declare_reveal() are defunct; declare_estimators() is gone.
  • Every table of estimates carries an estimand column and puts estimator, inquiry, and estimand after the tidied statistics. Two estimators with one label are renamed apart with a message rather than an error.

Deprecations

New

  • declare_parameters() names the values a design can be redesigned over, and declare_notes() names the quantities it works out along the way; design_parameters() and design_notes() list them. A declared parameter is bound for every step after it, including a helper function that reads it.
  • run_design(), draw_data(), draw_estimands(), and draw_estimates() take named parameter values, so draw_data(design, theta = 0.5) draws from a declaration that leaves theta free (closes #497). The values go through redesign(), so the rules about which names a design accepts are stated in one place, and supplying several values is refused rather than narrowed: sweep with redesign() and draw from each.
  • A design is a value: it carries the objects its expressions read, so it survives saveRDS(), reaches a parallel worker, and does not change meaning when a workspace variable is edited (closes #293).
  • Step-level draws fan a step out and hold everything upstream fixed; the diagnosis of such a design carries a variance_decomposition attributing the variance of each per-simulation quantity to the step that generated it.
  • An estimator that errors on a draw under simulate_design() is recorded as a row with error = TRUE, one warning per run gives the counts, and diagnosands use the draws that succeeded (closes #385). run_design() and draw_estimates() still stop.
  • Every simulation draw runs on its own L’Ecuyer-CMRG stream under any future::plan(), so a seeded run gives the same table sequentially and in parallel, and the caller’s own generator is left in the same place either way: one draw on, whichever plan is active (closes #445). furrr draws a value from the caller’s stream whenever it is handed a seed, so a parallel run used to leave it one uniform further on than a sequential one.
  • progress = TRUE on simulate_design() and diagnose_design(), or progressr::handlers(global = TRUE) once per session, reports progress through progressr, from parallel workers too.
  • print(design) shows the calls that declared the steps, as 1.x did, and the parameters redesign() can reach. summary(design) runs the design once and says under each step what it did to the data (rows kept, columns added, dropped or changed, the estimand, the estimate), returning the pieces as a summary.design object; run = FALSE skips the run.
  • diagnose_design() accepts a simulations data frame in place of a design and honours its grouping. diagnose_simulations() does the same thing under a name that says what the argument is.
  • default_diagnosands() and select_diagnosands() build a diagnosands set from names; tidy() works on a diagnosis.
  • Estimator and step arguments pass to .method or the handler as written, so methods that do their own non-standard evaluation work (closes #463; also #456, #457, #482, #509).

Failures that are now reported

  • A declare_measurement(), declare_assignment(), or declare_sampling() step that supplies its own rows, rather than receiving them from the model, no longer appends a row id column. 1.x asked for this at every call site but never passed the flag on to fabricate(), so the steps avoided a stray ID column only because they normally run with data already in hand, and a declaration that spelled out handler = fabricate got the ID anyway. The rule now belongs to the verb, whichever handler is named.
  • An inquiry that no estimator targets keeps its own row in a diagnosis, with an NA estimator and its mean_estimand, as in 1.x; the join had dropped it.
  • The warning that estimates and inquiries were matched ambiguously fires only when the match was ambiguous (closes #479). Two estimators both naming ATE, with other inquiries declared beside it, produce more rows than either table had, because the unanswered inquiries keep their own rows; the old test was that row count alone, so it reported a multiplication that had not happened and advised naming an inquiry the estimators had already named. A shared-column match now warns only where one key value carries more than one row on both sides, and says which key. A match on no shared column warns as before.
  • declare_sampling(handler = ) takes a custom sampling function, as the other data verbs do.
  • An estimator naming an inquiry no step produced warns once, naming the labels that exist.
  • A sampling step that produces no S column and has no filter warns once that every row was kept.
  • An error inside a step names the step and its verb, with the original error as the cause.
  • A redesign of a name the design does not use warns; a bare vector handed to a vector-valued parameter warns that it is being read as several designs.
  • redesign() names the list it returns by the values that distinguish each design (closes #472). redesign(design, N = c(10, 20)) gives N = 10 and N = 20, so a simulation’s design column and bind_rows(.id = "design") carry the values that vary; 1.x named them design_1, design_2, which is what a reader already knew from the position. A parameter whose value cannot be written down, such as a function or a data frame, leaves the whole list positional.