During this week our nights will again be longer and days shorter as a signal of change of season. Just now in Denmark sun is up at 04:39 and down at 22:05, further north even more bright hours. It is customary to make a status before summer vacation and the status for EpiData Development and maintenance is in short:
Analysis: The first pre-prototype of a rewritten Analysis is the main development task just now. Core functionality of internal routines is in focus (e.g. how should the software read a command, how to add options etc). There is nothing to test for users until some months from now, but it is progressing as planned. The aim of the rewriting will be to recreate current EpiData Analysis commands, but with a slight modernisation and unification of approach and commands - more on that later.
The EpiData List A few weeks back the list was not available, but this should have been fixed again, such that new list users can add themselves. First time you send a mail to the list we have to authorize it to secure against spam. Remember that files should be small and formatted as text (not html).
EntryClient and Manager: The public versions are working efficiently with very few bugs, which we attempt to remove quickly. Recently errors in export of dates to Stata version 14 was fixed. There has been an issue when opening files with the 64 bit windows version, but this can be remedied by using the 32 bit version.
Development versions of Manager and EntryClient: 1 Logging of user actions and control is in an in-house test. (e.g. someone can define dataforms and others only enter data). An issue of speed and actual control of what to add to logging is under consideration. 2 Configuration of Statusbar with contents of variables is working 3 Ability of automatic sending of backup file via email after entry is in test.
The plan is to issue a new test version with this functionality within 2 weeks.
I expect that we will no longer support export to SPSS and SAS since the maintenance of these two is cumbersome. The reason is that Stata format is fully documented and therefore easy to work with and R also reads Stata files.
Therefore apart from the epx format - we will most likely restrict import and export with variable and value labels to Stata (dta) and without labels to csv (separated). Some users might find that restrictive, but in view of the overall size of the EpiData project priority must be given to secure sustainability.
Such choices could lead to discussions on this list - which is highly welcomed.
warm regards to all
Jens Lauritsen Coordinator and Initiator of the Epidata Project