New JMP Journal Packager Add-In now available

brady_brady — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 18:09:10 GMT

JMP Journals are a great way to share the results of your analyses. One particularly nice feature of using a journal is that you can include links to as many supporting files as you like.

These supporting files do not have to be in the same directory — they can be anywhere. While this increases the flexibility of the file-linking feature, it does introduce some potential complications; perhaps at one time or another you have asked yourself one or both of the following:

What should I do when I would like to share my journal with others? Is it possible to “package” the journal automatically?

I might have moved some of the linked files. How can I tell whether all of the links in my journal are intact, without testing them all?

The new Journal Packager Add-In, now available at the JMP User Community’s File Exchange (a free SAS.com profile is required to get the add-in), addresses both of these needs.

The add-in allows you to package a journal for easy sharing: After you select a journal to be packaged, the add-in creates a timestamped folder in the location of your choosing, and copies into it all of the files needed by the journal, along with a copy of the journal, modified to use localized file references.

All that remains is for you to zip up all of the files in the folder and share as desired. When a recipient unzips the compressed file, the journal and the files it refers to will all be in the same folder. And the journal will work as intended, provided the recipient has JMP, of course.

If a broken link is encountered during the copying process, a “file did not exist” error will be written to an error log. If a file has more than one link in the journal, it will be copied only once: An “already present” error will be written to the log as subsequent links are encountered.

Even if you’re not planning on sharing your journal, the logging feature can be used to determine whether all of the links in your journal are intact: If a log containing at least one “file did not exist” error is written, the original journal has one or more broken links.

I hope this add-in will make your life a little easier as you work with and share JMP journals — head over to the File Exchange and try it out!

article New JMP Journal Packager Add-In now available in JMP Blog

New JMP Journal Packager Add-In now available