To all CSPro users around the world, the CSPro development team wishes you a happy holiday season. I have been fortunate this year to have had the chance to work on CSPro data processing with users in Armenia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, and Paraguay. Add in the hundreds of users who have emailed with questions, and CSPro users add up to a nice community. I hope that this website, and increased content next year, will help you fulfill your needs.

2012 should be a good year for CSPro, first with the addition of Unicode support, and then with steps towards the future of data entry, with focus on Android and other handheld development.

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:

This is the input file:

Download this example.

In CSPro 4.1.002, you can customize the menus of the data entry application, CSEntry, to change the menu options to be in the language of your choice, as long as the language can be represented in ASCII characters (most European languages). In the future, when CSPro supports Unicode, all language scripts will be supported.

To override the default text options, you must create a file called csentry.menu and place it either in the Program Files\CSPro 4.1\ folder, or in the folder where the PFF file for your application is located. This file has a format that is easy to follow. For example, to override the File menu text, you would place this text in the file:

To add shortcut keys, place an ampersand before the shortcut letter. For example:

Placing the file in the Program Files\CSPro 4.1\ folder means that it will affect every single data entry application run on that machine. Alternatively, placing it in a folder with the PFF allows you to have different menus for different users.

Soon on this site I will post French and Spanish language menus on the Tools page. For now, if you would like to create your own menus, use this template file.

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.

This code looks like it will not compile correctly:

The compiler may complain that versionNumber is not a function that exists. However, starting in CSPro 4.1.002, you can attach multiple logic files to an application. In this case, if versionNumber is defined in a different file, the code will compile successfully.

When compiling your code, CSPro will load any additional logic files as if the text of these files were inserted in PROC GLOBAL. This means that only things that can go in PROC GLOBAL can be declared in an external logic file, but that includes variables, arrays, and user-defined functions that you use across many applications. In the above example, I might create a file, myfunctions.app, that contains code that I use frequently. It would look like this:

There is no need to write PROC GLOBAL in this external logic file. To add the file to the application, I select File -> Add Files, and then select my External Logic File:

These files are listed in the tree in the Files window under the main logic file for your application. External logic files can be removed by selecting File -> Drop Files.

Download the above example as a batch application.