CSPro Users

When CSPro has an interface for a tool, I suggest that you use the interface as much as possible, but on occasion a user might want to write code for more advanced functionality. One such example is when writing code for advanced export operations.

The CSPro help documents include some information on the export statement, but I often forget the syntax or what exactly the parameters should be. Fortunately, now with CSPro 4.1.002, a feature of the Export Data tool allows you to view the code that powers the export. By selecting Options -> Copy Logic to Clipboard, you can then take the export logic and insert it in the batch application of your choosing. This is a nice way to quickly get the basic export code needed and then you can build off of that.

For an example of a batch export that uses a lookup file, imagine that I have a data file describing stores and their customers. One of the attributes of a customer record is a country code that describes where the customer lives. When exporting the names of the customers, I do not want the two-letter country code, but the full name of the country. Using this list of country codes as a lookup file, I would go into the export tool, select the fields that I want to export, and then after copying the logic to the clipboard I would see code like this:

I would insert this code into a new batch application, add my lookup file code, and I would end up with something like this:

This feature in the Export Data tool vastly simplified my task, allowing me to focus on the lookup file programming, rather than the syntax of the export statement. My exported file now contains data from two files:

500  Pastry Pantry     Barack Obama          US  United States
500  Pastry Pantry     Angela Merkel         DE  Germany
500  Pastry Pantry     Hu Jintao             CN  China
800  Chocolate Heaven  Jacob Zuma            ZA  South Africa
800  Chocolate Heaven  Alexander Lukashenko  BY  Belarus

This is the input file:

10500Pastry Pantry
20500Barack Obama                                      US
20500Angela Merkel                                     DE
20500Hu Jintao                                         CN
10800Chocolate Heaven
20800Jacob Zuma                                        ZA
20800Alexander Lukashenko                              BY

Download this example.

CSPro 4.1.002 comes with a few new functions that may come in handy for your data processing needs. The function getusername returns the name under which the user logged onto Windows. This can be useful if you want to restrict access to a data entry program for only a few users. Imagine a control system for a data entry operation in which only supervisors have access to parts of the system. By giving the supervisors logins such as super1, super2, etc., you could restrict access as follows:

The function randomin works by accepting as an argument either an in list or a value set. The function then returns a random value that falls somewhere in the listed values. It is now easy to get a random value within a non-continuous range:

You can weight certain values by repeating the occurrence of the value in the in list. For example, the following example will return three times as many 1 values as 2 values:

The function is probably most useful when used with a value set. For example, if you have a data file for a survey and you are planning on adding a question to the survey about religion, you may want to test out your edits for this variable. Your old data does not have this variable, so you would write a batch edit program and then add random religion data to a test data file, which you could pass through your edit programs:

The randomizevs function is useful for data entry applications that use the extended controls introduced in CSPro 4.1. Sometimes you may want to ask questions and randomize the order of the possible responses to avoid bias due to the item positioning. In the preproc of the relevant question, you could execute the randomizevs function to present a different order each time:

In the above example, 98 might be a “None of the above” code and 99 might be a “Do not know” code. You do not want these codes randomized with the rest, you always want them at the bottom of the value set list, so you exclude them from the randomization.

In CSPro 4.1.002 there are three small language changes and additions that may make writing code easier. First, the change:

In the past, when using the count function it was necessary to specify what record or group you wanted to search through (in the above case, POP_REC). Now you can write the code without specifying this clause.

The seek function, new to CSPro 4.1, searches a record for the first instance of something being true. Now, in CSPro 4.1.002, you can search for the nth occurrence of the conditional statement. For example, this loop will continue until there are no longer two spouses in a household:

Finally, the sort function has long been a useful feature of the CSPro language, but now you can use it with a where statement. For example, a common request is to have a roster sorted based on relationships. This example sorts a roster by relationship, and then sorts the children in order by descending age: