Ieboilsave

This article is meant to describe use cases, work flow and the reasoning used when developing the commands. For instructions on how to use the command specifically in Stata and for a complete list of the options available, see the help files by typing help ieboilsave in Stata. This command is a part of the package ietoolkit. To install all the commands in this package, type ssc install ietoolkit in Stata.

Read First

• ieboilsave is still in its beta version, meaning that it's very new and we are using it for experimentation.
• The beta version still works and can be used, however, it might not yet be very useful and new version might include dramatic changes.
• This article describes what the intended use case is, but all functionality might not yet be implemented.

Intended use cases

The use case is very similar to ieboilstart as both commands help the user by including best practice boilerplate code without having to type it up manually. Instead of running boilerplate code in the very beginning of a master do-file as ieboilstart does, ieboilsave is meant to be run immediately before saving a dataset.

ieboilsave runs tests that are good practice to run each time before you save a dataset, and it stores meta information about your dataset: when it was last saved, which version of Stata was used to create it, which is the ID variable etc., attached to the dataset using Stata's built in char command.

ieboilsave tests that the ID variable is still uniquely and fully identifying and can perform tests, for example, that a specified list of variables have no missing values or are valid dummy variables. These tests make sure that no changes to the code accidentally invalidate the ID variable, create missing values in variables that should never be missing, etc.

For a complete list of tests that ieboilsave can perform, see the help file in Stata.

Instructions

These instructions are meant to help you understand how to use the command. For technical instructions on how to implement the command in Stata see the help files by typing help ieboilsave in Stata.

Run ieboilsave on the line immediately before you save the dataset. ieboilsave is meant to be used before saving datasets to be used for analysis and dissemination. It is probably not worth the effort to use ieboilsave before each intermediate dataset that you save for your own convenience.

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