[Download-List] EVAL IF-THEN FROM SECONDARY FILE

[Spitzner, Eric]

Jeffery,
 
I think you'll have to use TRANS('file',key'field','X') within EVAL.
 
HTH
Eric Spitzner, CDP (eric.spitzner at quinnipiac.edu)
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Quinnipiac University; Hamden, Connecticut
Sun V490; Solaris 10; UniData 7.1.0
Colleague 18 and Benefactor 5.1 

________________________________



I'm trying to avoid:

 

1.	Doing additional changes in Excel after-the-fact, and/or 
2.	Creating additional computed columns 

 

We're involved in a pilot study and must provide data to the think-tank
in charge of the study.

 

The requirements for several fields are to fill in any blank values for
fields with "9" for however many characters for the field in question.
I don't understand why the think-tank can ignore "9999" and not "blank"
but I must comply with the data requirements nevertheless! :-)

 

For many of these fields in DOWNLOAD I'm able to do:

 

EVAL "IF field THEN field ELSE '999'"

 

I'm having trouble with SECONDARY.FILE fields.

 

For example, we have a field for SAT Verbal in APPLICANTS.  If I do the
DOWNLOAD statement in APPLICANTS then my logic above works fine for the
field(s) in question.  But the majority of fields come from PERSON, so
overall less fields will need to use this "IF-THEN" logic.  Otherwise
I'd use APPLICANTS as my "starting point" file.  Regardless of which
file is my primary file I'll need to have some fields like this:

 

EVAL "IF file->field THEN file->field ELSE '999'"

 

Unfortunately this only returns null values.  Is there something I
should do differently in DOWNLOAD for this logic to work or am I stuck
with options #1 & #2 at the top?

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

Jeffery G. Summers

Transylvania University

300 N. Broadway

Lexington, KY 40508

jsummers at transy.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.cedarville.edu/pipermail/download-list/attachments/20070925/ac526641/attachment.html>