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A new extension command for SPSS Statistics,
STATS IF, has been uploaded to the SPSS Community website.
This command allows you in essence
to apply IF logic to procedure stream execution. For example, you
could write
STATS IF CONDITION1="spss.GetCaseCount()
> 100" CONDITION2="True"
/SYNTAX1
"DESC ALL."
"REGRESSION"
" /DEPENDENT salary"
" /METHOD=ENTER jobtime educ."
/SYNTAX2
"FREQ ALL.".
It would run DESCRIPTIVES and REGRESSION
if there are more than 100 cases and FREQUENCIES otherwise.
It also includes fine-grained error
control. For example, you could use it to log all serious errors
to an external file for review and respond to errors dynamically.
The traditional syntax lines must be
quoted so that they can be controlled by STATS IF.
The conditions must be Python expressions
with inputs from apis as above and variables previously constructed in
Python program blocks.
This command even supports conditional
macro definition, so it offers an interesting way of letting macros adapt
to the data and metadata in a way that is not possible with macro alone
(brain damage alert).
All the functionality of this extension
could be done with pure Python Statistics code, but this command may be
more convenient in many cases.
STATS IF requires the Python Essentials and at least version 18 of Statistics.
It can be downloaded from within Statistics using the Utilities menu in
version 22. For older versions you can download it from the SPSS Community
website (www.ibm.com/developerworks/spssdevcentral)
in the Extension Commands collection.
Jon Peck (no "h") aka Kim
Senior Software Engineer, IBM
[hidden email]
phone: 720-342-5621
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