Date:         Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:13:19 -0400
Reply-To:     Gene Maguin <emaguin@buffalo.edu>
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Gene Maguin <emaguin@buffalo.edu>
Subject:      Re: SPSS - best practices?
In-Reply-To:  <5C7C0A66-6642-4B5C-90D4-413D6EB26453@sbcglobal.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Linda,

Are you losing cases, variables or values? By the latter, I mean, are values
changing when they haven't otherwise been operated on. As you have probably
seen, there have been reported (and acknowledged, I believe) problems with
the display of records but the records, themselves, have not been deleted, I
think. Perhaps others can comment on this point.

It sounds like your operations are quite complex. My suggestion, and you may
already be doing this, is to institute an audit trail--and ruthlessly stick
to it. What I mean is that every operation or set of operations that adds or
deletes records, or modifies values is saved to a new dataset, which is
named in structured way so that the sequence is apparent without looking at
creation/modification dates. The new dataset is the then used for the next
set of operations. As a second step you could do the same with your syntax
files, either through separate files or through a single, increasingly large
file with internal documentation.

Gene Maguin

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