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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

rxref 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2026-05-27

New features

  • Added support for retrieving active and historical RxNorm product concepts in product discovery workflows, including products_for_ingredients() and related search helpers.
  • Added concept_status support to allow users to request active concepts only or active plus historical RxNorm concepts, where supported.
  • Added exclude_products_with_ingredients(), a product-level filtering helper for removing RxNorm products that contain user-specified ingredients.
  • exclude_products_with_ingredients() supports fixed-dose combination products represented with semicolon-delimited ingredient names or RxCUIs, such as "atenolol; chlorthalidone".
  • Added safer internal handling for historical concept verification and lookups, reducing failures when RxNorm returns incomplete, empty, or unexpected API responses.

Improvements

  • Improved retrieval of clinical product attributes for historical RxCUIs by attempting to recover dose form, dose form group, route, ingredient count, and ingredient metadata when available.
  • Improved route filtering workflows for products that include historical RxNorm concepts.
  • Improved fixed-dose combination formatting in get_clinical_attributes(). Ingredient fields such as ingredient_rxcui, ingredient_name, and ingredient_tty now use semicolon-delimited strings instead of pseudo-vector strings.
  • Improved consistency of product-level ingredient metadata to support cleaner downstream joins and filtering.
  • Improved reuse of cached API responses in product discovery, historical concept lookup, and clinical attribute workflows to reduce repeated calls to the RxNorm and RxClass APIs.
  • Added or improved progress reporting for longer-running product discovery workflows, including API retrieval steps where appropriate.
  • Updated route-specific vignette example datasets so package vignettes do not rely on live API calls during package checks.
  • Updated vignette example datasets to avoid duplicated .x / .y join columns and to use current, singular column naming conventions.
  • Updated README examples and package vignettes to reflect current function behavior, argument names, output columns, and recommended workflows.
  • Improved internal helper functions for normalizing product ingredient fields and handling fixed-dose combination products.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed issues where historical or obsolete RxCUIs could return incomplete clinical attributes and be unintentionally dropped from route-filtered workflows.
  • Fixed cases where historical product concepts could produce incorrect or inflated ingredient counts.
  • Fixed validation and test coverage for concept_status arguments.
  • Fixed issues arising from incomplete or malformed historical concept lookups.
  • Fixed vignette data-generation issues that could create unexpected NA rows in pre-built example datasets.
  • Fixed CRAN submission issues related to API name formatting, web references, and package citation handling.

Documentation

  • Updated package documentation to describe active and historical RxNorm concept support.
  • Updated documentation for product discovery, clinical attribute retrieval, route filtering, and fixed-dose combination handling.
  • Updated NEWS, README, vignettes, and CRAN-facing metadata for the 0.4.0 release.
  • Updated package citation handling to avoid errors when the package is not installed.

rxref 0.3.0

  • Removed the experimental set_backend() helper. rxref currently uses the RxNorm/RxClass APIs directly.