[Babase] Updating Members for Changed Snames

Karl O. Pinc babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:02:36 +0000


On 04/13/2005 09:05:05 AM, Catherine Markham wrote:
> Karl,
> 
> I had in my mind that manual changes to members was not a good thing.   
> Rather, members should be rebuilt by running the reinterp program  
> following changes to the biograph and/or census tables.  But would  
> changing the snames for TT and ED to three letter codes be an  
> exception?
> I played around with this in an old version of BaBase to test out  
> both options (running the program vs. manual update).  With regard to  
> relying on the reinterp program, I can't seem to get it to work  
> correctly for these guys.  I first made changes to biograph and  
> census, checked for earliest census date, and followed the prompts in  
> the reinterp pop-up window.  I'm not sure if this is because I'm  
> typing something in wrong, or if it has to do with the fact that  
> these are old records (dating back to the early 70s) and not handled  
> the same way as more recent census/interpolation rows in members.  In  
> contrast, manually updating members is a breeze.  My only concern is  
> that this is "bad practice" and might haunt me later on.

Manually changing MEMBERS for TT and ED is not a problem.

The foxpro interpolation program won't deal with "old style"
census rows, so you have no choice but to make the changes
to MEMBERS manually.  I had to cut some corners while writing it.
(The same corners that are leading me to rewrite interpolation
now, so that it works in all cases.)  There is some way or
another to completely rebuild the MEMBERS table from CENSUS
but it's probably not fully automated.

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein