News from SPSS Developer Central

[Peck, Jon]

Here are some new items and recent updates for SPSS Developer Central (www.spss.com/devcentral).

 

First, Graham Wills, our visualization guru, and I now have a blog.  We are writing about graphics, programmability, and other SPSS topics.  Check it out at

www.spss.com/insideout

 

Blogs are a two-way street.  We would love to get your feedback on current posts and what you would like to hear about.

 

Second, there are some new items and updates on DevCentral Downloads

 

There is a new R-based custom dialog by Prof Hans A. Grüner of the Free University of Berlin.  It does a large number of regression diagnostic plots.  This requires Version 17 and the R plug-in along with the R car package.

 

The CASECTRL extension command matches cases in one dataset with random draws of cases in another based on values of specified key variables.  It requires exact matches on the keys.  There is now a new version that can do fuzzy matching.  You can specify a tolerance value for each numeric key.  It will by default try for an exact match first and then fall back to any case matching within the tolerance.  You can also have it always just try for any case within the tolerance values.  Fuzzy matching will, naturally, take longer to execute and use more memory, but exact matching should use the same resources as before.

 

This new command is named FUZZY and should be considered a beta, since the changes go pretty deep into the code.  Once the dust settles, I expect to rename it and replace the original CASECTRL command.  It requires the Python plug-in and version 16 or 17.  After installing it, run

FUZZY /HELP. to see the full syntax.

 

The  SPSSINC MODIFY TABLES extension command has some new features.

You can now specify the label text to match using a regular expression as well the previous specification of literal text and/or row or column numbers.

Custom style functions can now have parameters that are expressed in the command syntax.  For example, the customstylefunctions module included in the package has a function, stripeOddRows, that sets the background color for the odd-numbered rows to blue (RGB 0,0,200).  It is selected by the CUSTOMFUNCTION keyword, e.g.,

CUSTOMFUNCTION="customstylefunctions.stripeOddRows"

It also now has stripeOddRows2 that takes parameters for the color.  E. g.,

CUSTOMFUNCTION="customstylefunctions.stripeOddRows(r=0, g=0, b=200)"

These functions are very easy to write.  By providing parameters, you can make the functions more flexible and write fewer of them.

My latest blog entry is about this command, although I haven't gotten to custom functions yet.

 

SPSSINC MODIFY TABLES requires version 17 and the Python programmability plug-in.

 

The SDK for building programmability extensions has been updated to version 17.0.1.

 

We hope you will find these items useful.

 

 

Jon K. Peck

SPSS Inc.

[hidden email]

(ip) phone [phone]

now blogging at www.spss.com/insideout

 

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