Lock or unlock an rnaSentry signature — lock

Toggles the reproducibility guardrail on an rnaSentry_signature object. Locking records a timestamp and an audit entry in the signature's flags table; downstream stages that must not be rerun after publication can then be protected. The function is copy-on-write: the input object is never modified and the updated signature is returned.

lock_signature(sig, lock = TRUE)

Arguments

sig: An object of class "rnaSentry_signature", as returned by build_signature.
lock: Logical. TRUE (default) locks the signature, FALSE unlocks it.

Value

A new rnaSentry_signature object with updated locked, lock_time and flags fields.

Enforceable lock

Locking stores a gene-set fingerprint in a session-level environment. While this fingerprint is set, run_rnaSentry() will refuse to run, preventing silent re-selection of genes after survival analysis. The lock can be reversed by calling lock_signature(sig, lock = FALSE), but doing so after survival stages have been run is not recommended.

Examples

sig <- structure(list(genes = "gene1", outcome = "overall_survival",
                      locked = FALSE),
                 class = "rnaSentry_signature")
locked <- lock_signature(sig)
locked$locked
#> [1] TRUE
locked$lock_time
#> [1] "2026-10-04 20:29:26 UTC"
unlocked <- lock_signature(locked, lock = FALSE)
unlocked$locked
#> [1] FALSE