Problem with EU statistics retrieval

[pitkant]

There seems to be a problem with retrieving indicators for EU data such as indicator 10013 (EU) Unemployment rate of young people aged 16-24 years

Tested on https://sotkanet.fi website GUI:

• First of all, it does not follow the same pattern as many other Sotkanet datasets:

  • "Indikaattorista "(EU) Nuorisotyöttömyysaste" [id:10013] ei ole tietoja sukupuolivalinnalla "yhteensä""
  • "Indicator "(EU) Unemployment rate of young people aged 16-24 years" [id:10013] has no data for the gender "combined""

• Secondly, combining Finnish regions with EU regions results in the following error:

  • "Virhe hakukriteereissä: Et voi valita samanaikaisesti sekä Suomen aluetason että Euroopan alueita"
  • "Virhe hakukriteereissä: You cannot select areas at both the Finnish and European level."

• Thirdly, making the query in sotkanet package just results in an empty list, with no error codes or anything (GetDataSotkanet(10013, years = 2000))

• We should look if the API returns similar error messages as the web GUI when making this query. It would be helpful if it returned something else than 200. Maybe this issue needs to be brought up to Sotkanet API maintainers

• We should at least warn the error if a valid indicator request results in an empty data.frame object

• We should mention unexpected behaviour like this in function documentation and direct users to use e.g. the eurostat package instead

[pitkant]

"Indicator "(EU) Unemployment rate of young people aged 16-24 years" [id:10013] has no data for the gender "combined""

The default for indicators is "total" but this dataset does not have observations for total (combined). This is interesting since "total" is mentioned in SotkanetIndicatorMetadata:

$classifications$sex$values
[1] "male"   "female" "total" 

I wonder how many indicators don't have values for total and whether "total" is a sensible default.