st: Label categorical axis of - graph box - with dates

["Allan Reese (Cefas)" <allan.reese@cefas.co.uk>]

This ought to be obvious; apologies if it's well documented elsewhere.

A dataset where the group variable is a date, stored as integer with %td format:
- tab idate -         shows the dates as 1apr2012 etc with count for each date
- scatter y idate -   labels the X axis with date values, though not necessarily those in the data
- graph box y, over(idate) - 
                      labels the categories with the internal (SIF) values 
- graph box y, over(idate, label( angle(30) format(%td) ) ) - 
                      rotates the labels; format is ignored but NOT flagged as error

The workround is to create a string variable containing the date strings, use that for the labels but coerce the date ordering:

- g sdate=string(idate,"%td")  -
- graph box y, over( sdate, label(angle(30)) sort(idate)) -

It seems a bug that the format is honoured by scatter but not by box, and another that a format option is accepted but ignored.

Allan


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