Listing Part 2 - Using Blaise 4.7 for Coding Listing Instruments
Rob Wallace, Roberto Picha & Michael Mangiapane; US Census Bureau, USA
At the 2004 IBUC conference, a paper was presented on the different listing operations conducted by the Census
Bureau. That paper discussed the different listing surveys conducted by the Census Bureau, how Blaise was used
to code some of current listing applications, and challenges that faced us with converting two of our larger,
complex, listing instruments to Blaise - Permit Address Listing (PAL) and Survey of Construction (SOC).
For the 2006 IBUC conference, this paper will follow-up on the progress of converting these two listing surveys
from Clipper to Blaise 4.7. Topics are:
• Discuss requirements gathering process
• Review some of the challenging functionality requested by the sponsors. This would include things such as:
o Calling an external program from within the listing and passing data from that program into the listing table,
o Creating look-up tables on the fly, based on what has already been listed,
o Using different listing tables based on interviewer preference, and
o Toggling between a “line view” of the listing and “full screen view” of a listing record.
• Discuss Blaise Free Form Navigation – can this work for listing?
• Discuss approach for handling some of this functionality
• Discuss issues encountered with using Blaise 4.7 for listing
• Demo the latest version of one or both instruments
The concept of creating a listing instrument seems relatively simple. One simply creates a table and list data.
However, things are never that simple. There lots of special situations and circumstances that must be addressed
and handled by the listing instrument and related programs. Things such as re-entering a completed listing to add
more records, generating sample cases on the fly, re-starting listings that are not correct, and using different tables
for different preferences. All of these requirements make programming a listing instrument an interesting
challenge.
| Contact: malcolm.robert.wallace@census.gov |