[Gretl-devel] Re: entering string-valued series directly
Am 10.09.2020 um 21:10 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
On Thu, 10 Sep 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:
> I was wondering how to achieve that in the GUI. I can look at
the
> string values alright, but when I choose "edit", then I get the
> numerical values instead. So I cannot change the spelling of a string
> label, for example. (Always in the GUI I mean.) For example from
> "U.S." to "USA" or stuff like that.
I can envisage it being easy to mess up a string-valued series via the
GUI unless the interface is both quite complex and very carefully
designed. Think about changing all occurrences of "U.S." to "USA"
versus
changing the string (and hence the code) for a particular observation
(from one already-valid string to another).
For the latter operation, if there were a fairly small number of
distinct values we could offer a pop-down list to choose from. Otherwise
I'm not sure what we'd do. For the former I guess we could also do a
pop-down next to a replace-by box, or free-form fields with good error
checking?
How much demand is there likely to be for this sort of thing? It's
obviously doable in principle but would be quite a lot of work.
My concrete problem had to do with using (or trying to use) geoplot in a
GUI-only way. Think of a series "geounit" with the string-valued geo
identifiers. Each value will be unique because it effectively works like
an observation label - but AFAICS it has to come in the form of a
regular series for join-ing and so forth.
So there you don't have the problem of mass edits. I would tend to
pragmatically burden the user with the responsibility for messing up; no
complicated interface or features intended.
I guess the open question is what to do with the numerical code for the
edited string. Spontaneously I would just add a new one. (Or do those
have to be contiguous?)
cheers
sven