Displays a dialog with any number of controls that you define, including edit fields, listboxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, text, and captions. You may specify an combination of controls, and they will be arranged in the order they are entered. EViews attempts to lay the controls out in a visually pleasing manner, and will do its best to size and arrange the dialog accordingly.

Each cinfo# item is a specification of the control type in quotes (“Edit”), followed by appropriate parameters. You may specify any combination of controls, where each should follow one of the following forms:

In the above table, the parameters can be described as:

Note that parameters whose names begin with “IO_”, e.g. “IO_String” should be passed into the function using replacment variables or objects in the workfile, as they are used to return results.

The “button” and “buttonc” controls add a custom button to the dialog. The dialog will close after a button has been pressed. The behavior of the button will depend on the type of button —buttons of type “button” will behave in the same way as the “OK” button (i.e., all variables passed into the dialog will be updated to reflect changes made to their corresponding controls). Buttons of type “buttonc” will behave in the same way as the “Cancel” button (i.e., all variables will be reset to the values that were passed into the dialog).

The return value of the dialog will correspond to the order in which buttons are placed in the dialog. If only one button (apart from the standard “OK” and “Cancel”) is included in the dialog, the return value for that button will be “1”. If there is more than one button, then the first button will return a value of “1”, the second will return a value of “2” and so on. Note that the return value is independent of whether the button was of type “button” or “buttonc”. The specification for the button controls is (“button[c]”, “text”) where text specifies the text that will be on the button.

These commands display a dialog with an edit field and four radio buttons labeled “Chicken Marsala”, “Beef Stew”, “Hamburger”, and “Salad”. The title “Enter your name” appears above the edit field, while the groupbox surrounding the radio buttons is labeled “Choose dinner”. The words “Dinner Menu” appear in the caption area, or titlebar, of the dialog. The edit field is initially blank, since we did not assign any text to the string NAME. The dinner selection radio buttons are initialized with the value 2, so the “Beef Stew” radio will be selected. We limit the name length to 64 characters.

This creates a dialog with a text string and a listbox. The text “We have many pieces to suit your style” appears at the top. A listbox follows, with the label “Please make a selection” and the options: “Shirt”, “Pants”, “Shoes”, “Hat”, and “Tie”. The listbox is initialized to the third item, “Shoes”. If the user then selects the first item, “Shirt”, from the listbox and presses OK, the scalar SELECTION will hold the value 1.

Note that the text control can be used to help achieve the layout you desire. You can use it to insert empty text strings to add space between adjacent controls. For example,

will leave a space between the two checkboxes. In more complicated dialogs, this may also push the latter controls to a second column. You may have to experiment with the appearance of more complex dialogs.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for additional discussion.

For a detailed description of each control type, see @uiedit, @uilist, @uiprompt, @uiradio.

Displays a dialog with an edit field and prompt string that will be used to label the edit field.

The dialog shows an OK and Cancel button, and will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0).

These commands display a dialog with the text “Please enter your First Name:” followed by an edit field, initialized with the string “Joseph”. If the user edits the string to read “Joe” and presses the OK button, the dialog returns a value of 0 and NAME will now contain the string: Joe.

Similarly,

brings up a dialog with the prompt “Please enter your age” and an empty edit field with a maximum length of two characters. The user will not be able to enter more than two characters into the edit field.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uidialog, @uilist, @uiprompt, @uiradio.

Displays a file open/save style dialog.

Both filter and type may be specified using in-line text.

Note that the clicking OK on the dialog does not actually open or save the selected file, it merely returns the name of the selected file. Thus, specifying the type argument is simply cosmetic.)

The displayed dialog will display both an OK and a Cancel button, and will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0).

These commands display a file open dialog style containing a list of all files with a “.prg” extension in the folder “c:\temp\”. The user can navigate through the file system and select another file, whose path and name will be returned in the string MYFILE.

Note that the slightly different set of commands

will instead display a save dialog that opens in the “c:\” folder with the filename initialized to “temp.prg” (since MYFILE does not have the trailing “\”).

Leaving the filename argument blank on input will open the dialog in the default EViews directory:

opens a save dialog in the default EViews directory with no filtering and no default file.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uidialog, @uiedit, @uilist, @uiprompt, @uiradio.

Displays a dialog with a listbox and prompt string that will be used to label the listbox.

Both prompt and items may be specified using in-line text.

The dialog shows an OK and Cancel button, and will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0).

These commands display a dialog with a listbox containing the items “Item1”, “Item2”, and “Item3”. The title “Please select an item:” appears above the listbox, and the second item is initially selected. If the user selects the third item and presses OK, the string SELECTION will contain “Item3”, and the dialog will return the value 0.

Similarly,

brings up the same dialog with the third item selected. The scalar SEL will contain the user’s selection if OK is pressed.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uimlist, @uidialog, @uiedit, @uiprompt, @uiradio.

Displays a dialog with a listbox and prompt string that will be used to label the listbox.

Both prompt and items may be specified using in-line text.

The dialog shows an OK and Cancel button, and will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0).

These commands display a dialog with a multiple listbox containing the items “Item1”, “Item2”, and “Item3”. The title “Please select an item:” appears above the listbox, and the first and third items are initially selected. If the user additionally selects the second item and presses OK, the vector SELECTED will contain the elements 1,2,3, and the dialog will return the value 0.

If no items are selected in the dialog, SELECTED will be a one element vector containing the value -1.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uilist, @uidialog, @uiedit, @uiprompt, @uiradio.

Displays a prompt dialog with OK, Cancel, or Yes and No buttons. You must specify a message string for the prompt dialog, and optionally the type of icon and buttons the dialog should display. You may also instruct the message box to issue a beep when displayed.

The dialog will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0), Yes (1), or No (2).

button_type can be one of the following keywords:

beep_type can be one of the following keywords. The keywords change the type of beep that is omitted, where those beeps are defined by the Windows operating system definitions. If beep_type is omitted, no beep will be issued.

Displays a dialog with the message “Error: Too many observations” and the OK button.

Displays a dialog with the error message “Exceeded count. Would you like to continue?” and the YES, NO, and CANCEL buttons. If the user presses the YES button, the dialog will return the value 1.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uidialog, @uilist, @uiedit, @uiradio.

Displays a dialog with a listbox and prompt string that will be used to label the listbox.

Both prompt and items may be specified using in-line text.

The dialog shows an OK and Cancel button, and will return an integer representing the button clicked: Cancel (-1), OK (0).

These commands display a dialog with three radio buttons, labeled “Item1”, “Item2”, and “Item3”. The title “Please select an item:” appears above the radio buttons, and the second item is initially selected. If the user selects the third item and presses OK, the scalar SELECTION will contain the value 3, and the dialog will return the value 0.

See “User-Defined Dialogs” for discussion.

See also @uidialog, @uilist, @uiprompt, @uiedit.

Returns a vector or svector containing the list of unique values in the object specified by arg.

returns a vector containing the unique values in x.

returns a vector of the unique values of X, sorted from low to high.

See also @dupselem, @dupsobs, and @dupsid.

Creates an n1 element vector with a 1 in the n2-th element, and 0 elsewhere.

creates an 8 element vector with a 1 in the fifth element and 0 for the other 7 elements.

create HSELECT1 and HSELECT2 into which we extract column 3 from the matrix H.

See also @identity, @ones, and @zeros.

Creates an n-row matrix filled with the unstacked elements of the vector v. EViews will report a size mismatch if the number of elements of v is not evenly divisible by n.

Note that @unvec is the inverse of the @vec function.

See also @unvech, @vec, and @vech.

Creates a sym matrix with lower triangle filled using the unstacked elements of the vector v. The sym will be sized automatically. EViews will report a size mismatch if the number of elements of v does not correspond to a valid sym matrix size (is not a triangular number).

Note that @unvech is the inverse of the @vech function.

See also @unvec, @vec, and @vech.

Returns the uppercase representation of the string str.

Returns a matrix whose elements on and above the n-th diagonal match the corresponding elements of the matrix m, but whose elements below the n-th diagonal are zero.

By default, n is has a value of zero indicating the main diagonal. Positive values of n indicate super-diagonals, while negative values of k indicate sub-diagonals.

If we define the string object

the commands

return the string “I DID NOT DO IT”.

If ALPHA1 is an alpha series,

returns the upper of the strings in ALPHA1 for each observation in the workfile sample.

If SVEC1 is an string vector,

returns a string vector containing the uppercased elements of SVEC1.

The commands

while the matrix U1 contains,

the matrix U2 contains,

and the matrix U3 contains,

If we have the commands,

See also @lower.

Returns the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) value for a point in time input using a local time zone value.

The commands

convert local time at an 8 hour shift from UTC into UTC times.

If LOCALTIME is a series of local time values,

converts a series containing local time values at a 5 hour shift from UTC into a series containing UTC times, for observations in the workfile sample.

converts a series containing local time values in U.S. Pacific Time Zone (including daylight time adjustments) into a series containing UTC, for observations in the workfile sample.

if VLOCALTIME is a vector of time values,

converts the vector of local times in Stockholm, into UTC times.

See “Dates” and “Event Functions” for related discussion.

See also the related time zone functions @localt, @tz, @tzlist and @tzspec.