How to use WinDMSRun

Sunday, December 14th, 2008 | Data Management, Tools

There are a few tools that you should always be using to help you with your Dimensions work this article is about the tool “WinDMSRun”. WinDMSRun helps you quickly export data via dms scripts withought having to write any code. The WinDMSRun tool comes with the Dimensions development library and if you have this installed you can find it in the following directory.

C:\Program Files\SPSS Dimensions\DDL\Code\Tools\VB.NET\WinDMSRun

It is probably better to put an icon on your desktop of WinDMSRun because as you become familiar with dms scripts you will begin to see a need to use this tool.. At this stage i would also like to add that there are two other tools that you should look at , and they are

How to use DMQuery
How to use MDMExplorer

So once we have an icon on our desktop, double click it and you should see a screen like this.

Start Screen

WinDMSRun is an easy tool to use, as you can see we have some steps that we need to follow to get it to work,

1. Select Input Data: When you click on this step you are prompted with the Data Link Properties wizard. If you have not seen this screen before click hereotherwise fill in the details for you data , we are going to use the Museum xml files that can be found in the ddl

C:\Program Files\SPSS Dimensions\DDL\Data\XML

Select Input Data

2. Select Output Case Data: When you click on this step you will be asked to enter the Case Data location, so what we need to do is to set the metadata location to none and in our case we are going to export to a ddf file so we have specified the “Dimensions Data File” as the case data DSC and entered the location of the new file as “c:\temp\new_data.ddf“. Dont forget that if you are exporting to a differnet data format you will only be able to export to a file format that we have a “write” dsc for,

Select Output Data file

3. Select Output Metadata: When you click on this step you will be asked to specify the location of the output metadata file. In our example we are going to put the output file in the same directory as the ddf file.”c:\temp\Output Metadata.mdd“. You might be wondering why we need an output mdd and its a good question. The reason we have this is because we will always want an MDD file that represents the output data file. Sometimes when we do this sort of thing we reduce the number of questions used so we will want to have a mdd file that reflects that change.

Output Meteadata Path

4. Select Variables to Transfer: Next we can decided what fields we would like to include in our export. I often just use this form to help me make my select statements for mrStudio. its so easy to just tick the fields you want and use the text created in your mrStudio scripts.

Select fields to export

5. Filter the data:Once we have the fields we need we can then specify the filters. By default we get all data, but our datafiles might have test and live data in it so we will need to make the necessary changes to get the data that we want.

Specify a filter

6. Execute: Once we have all the correct information in place we can execute the job. Selecting option 6 pops up a window to show you the progress of your script.

Run the script

View Script: There are some other tabs in WinDMSRun and they can be helpful to us depending on what we want to do. The View script tab allows us to see the dms script that has been generated. This is where we could go and take the select statement out and use it in our mrStudio script.