Re: st: ado file help

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

I don't understand your first sentence: I can't see your code and thus
don't see references to -var1- and -var2-.

But your criticism of -syntax- is incorrect, not to say absurd. The
purpose of -syntax- is to signal to Stata what is valid syntax in a
program, no more, no less. Much of what a syntax statement does in
practice is to look forward to what the program will do, including
generate new variables. As I have already said, you can signal
variable names that you want to use, just not as if they were existing
variables.

Nick

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:40 PM, tashi lama <ltashi32@hotmail.com> wrote:
> in this code, 2 variables are created namely var1 and var2. So, I want to create a dataset using syntax options, which I did.  I would also like to have the flexibility of drawing graphs of the variables I want ( say for example tsline var1 or var2 or both)  or list the variables(say for example list var2 or var2 or both )  for that matter. What really sucks is syntax's limitation to only look backward. As I said, I could have syntax statement after creating dataset( and I am sure that wouldn't be that hard) but for this particular example, I need to define it before to create datasets on first place.
>
> Note: I am very careful to not use any abbreviation while posting ):  example for eg.
>
> Thanx
> ----------------------------------------
>> Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:23:00 +0100
>> Subject: Re: st: ado file help
>> From: njcoxstata@gmail.com
>> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>>
>> Quite. -varname- or -varlist- in a -syntax- statement refers to an
>> existing variable; if what you supply is not the name of an existing
>> variable, that is an error. That will be inevitable if there are no
>> data in memory.
>>
>> If you need to supply such a name, you must supply it in some other
>> way. I thought that the main purpose of this program was to read in
>> data and that -odbc- takes care of that for you.
>>
>> Nick
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:15 PM, tashi lama <ltashi32@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> > Works like a magic. Thanx guys. There is a slight problem however. If I were to extend this and include varlist in the syntax,
>> >
>> > ......
>> > syntax [varlist], STARTdate(str) ENDdate(str) BROKERid(numeric) GRAPHtype(str)
>> > obdc load, exec("select date(read_date), count(*) from readership where source_id==`brokerid' and date(read_date) between '`startdate'' and '`enddate'' group by date(read_date)")
>> > .......
>> > end
>> >
>> > and when I call
>> > dd var1, startdate("2011-01-01") enddate("2011-01-20") broker(6429)
>> > stata isn't happy and returns "no variables defined". It makes kind of sense syntax command doesn't see any data since it is defined before generating dataset. However, I need to define syntax, options to generate dataset in first place. Any idea how to solve this?
>> >
>>
>> *
>> * For searches and help try:
>> * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
>> * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
>> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/