This guide has described the CSPro language and has presented examples of various types of edits. However, the job of writing and testing a CSPro program to perform many edits is still a large one. Because of the structure of the CSPro language, this job can be distributed among several people if it is well coordinated.
Before coding begins, a complete set of edit specifications and a formatted listing of the data diction ary should be available. A team leader should be appointed; this person should have a thorough understanding of the CSPro language. The leader should develop the naming conventions and standards that are to be followed by other members of the team. During the course of program development, questions will arise about the edit specifications, and it is important to involve subject-matter specialists to resolve these issues.
This section outlines a step-by-step approach to developing a CSPro program. It assumes that a data dictionary has been developed. If this is not the case, then the first step is to build the data dictionary using the Data Dictionary module and to check the dictionary carefully against original specifications.
An editing system may contain more than one CSPro program. It is not unusual to have at least two CSPro programs in the edit system: the first is used to find and report
structure errors which must be resolved before the data moves on to the next stage. These include missing records, duplicate records, or other incompatibilities with requirements which are considered essential to the processing. The second program is the more traditional value-validation and consistency edits.