Users file

In addition to providing the facilities for displaying prompts, table options and help texts in languages other than English, the users file determines which commands a user may or may not use with the current database. It consists of a line or block of lines for each user.

Each user’s entry starts with the user’s login name. This is followed by a space-separated list of keywords from the list below, either on the same line as the user’s name, or on a number of lines underneath. If many users share the same permissions, you can define a global set of access rights at the top of the file, under the special user name ‘all’, and omit those users from the rest of the file.

Allow/disallow alteration of texts and titles. alter=n also disallows use of rename and delete. The default is alter=y.

Allow/disallow the creation of new axes, numeric variables and named filters. The default is create=y. create and basic are never valid commands in multiproject databases.

Defines the maximum number of new elements that can be created with the create statement. The default is 1,000. n is calculated as follows:

n multiplied by 3 to give an average of 3 filters per element

n multiplied by 25 (characters in the text heap) to cater for titles, an overall axis heading, and so on.

Suppose you want to create a new axis with 1,000 elements, but, which has a lot of text, say, 80 characters per element. In this case, you need 80,000 characters in the text heap. To obtain this figure, use the formula 80,000/25 which results in 3,200 elements — even though you only need to use 1,000 of the element slots.

Use the named axis as the default column (breakdown) axis instead of the default dummy axis that was created when the database was flipped.

Disallow access to the named axes and variables. Notes are as for include below.

Filter all analyses by the given filter. You can specify the filter as a named filter (for example, filter=male, where male is a named filter which counts men only), or as an axis name followed by one or more element names. The axis name must be separated from the element name by a dot and, if there is more than one filter element, the elements must be separated by commas. Thus:

filters all analyses so that they include only those respondents who tried white, brown and/or wholemeal bread.

Allow access to the named axes and variables only. Names must be separated by commas. The dummy axis is always available to all users. Lists of more than one line must be split at a comma with the second (and subsequent) lines starting in a column other than 1. include and exclude should be used with care since it is possible that a user may create axes in one session but be unable to access them in another. Include= is not valid on Windows, and Quanvert issues an error message if such a statement is found.

Name the language in which prompts should be displayed. Possibilities are English (default), French, German, Italian and Spanish, but others may be defined by adding their names to the availang file.

The users file must always be written in English. language may be the full language name or just as many characters of it as are required for it to match the language file in the Quanvert program directory; for example, lang=e might match english and egyptian, whereas lang=eng matches english only.

For more information about the availang file, see Translatable prompts.

Determine which, if any, n11 elements are to be printed. The default is none which suppresses all n11s. first prints the first n11 in the axis as if it were an n10, and all prints all n11s as if they were n10s.

Determine whether or not to pause every 22 lines when displaying output on the screen. The default is page=y.

Names the profile postprocessor file for this database (the default is profopts in the database directory). You can abbreviate long path names using the special characters . and .. (that is, dot and dot-dot). The UNIX symbol ~ meaning the user’s home directory is not recognized.

Use a page width of n characters. This overrides the default set on the flipped a; statement.

Use a row text width of n characters. This overrides the default set on the flipped a; statement.

Define the number of characters to display per line on the user’s screen. Any value between 60 and 160 is acceptable, the default being termwid=80.

Allow/disallow access to unweighted counts, and the profile and list commands. The default is unwt=y.

The defaults given above are system defaults which may be overridden by the same parameter at ‘all’ or user level. You can place several parameters on a line as long as they are separated by spaces, and may continue an entry over several lines by starting the continuation lines with at least one space.

all  unwt=y
ben  unwt=n create=n alter=n
     include=age,sex,marry,house,region,childs

barbara
  profopts=pr_proc
  exclude=tried,bought,likes1,likes2,
     why,numloaf
  lang=f termwid=132

This says that everyone except Ben has access to the unweighted figures. Ben may not create or alter axes, and has access to the named axes only. Barbara reads profile options from the file pr_proc in the database directory, is prompted in French and has 132 characters per line. She may use all variables except those named with exclude.

If you create a users file which contains the names of specific users but does not start with the global user ‘all’, only users named in the users file will be allowed access to the database. If unnamed users are to have unrestricted access to the database, enter the username ‘all’ at the top of the file and follow it with a parameter with a default setting (for example, create=y; alter=y; and so on).