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Re: st: web access to files


From   Kaleb Michaud <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: web access to files
Date   Thu, 22 May 2003 11:19:03 -0500

Thanks for your comments, Kit. The primary examples that you and Alan have used definitely make one question the true existence of a file on the web, but these seem like a limited reason to deny the -confirm file- command complete web access. I have no intention of ever using a "http:" address that would do this (albeit it is possible), but rather I would take advantage of sites specifically set up for use by me in Stata.

For example, one should be able to set up an adopath for a web site that contains a central set of personal/custom ados. You could then run this from anywhere in the world and know that you are always using the most current versions. You should be able to use the "which" command with this as well (another command that doesn't work with http probably due to the same reason).

Now, I'm not your average user, but I do see the long-term benefits for others of making this possible. Currently & locally, we keep our ados, data, and profile.do's on a central server so that we don't have to constantly update each computer individually. Now that we have 15+ users across the world, we need something similar. I have created a useful ado archive system (easier to update/maintain than the .toc & .pck system especially since most files are customized for our data) so these users can get the newer or older versions of any of our ado files; they are all on the web, and so far with XP it appears to work well. It is for the Win2k/Mac users that this becomes a problem. I also imagine that this will be expanded to be a source of data files as well - it may be that we will just need to map the web site(s) to local drives for security and ease of use, but I thought you should at least know why this has become an issue for us.

Also, I am still curious as to what Stata does to check the existence of these web files checked using the -net- commands if -confirm file- isn't used.

Kaleb Michaud
Arthritis Research Center

At 07:18 AM 5/21/2003 -0400, you wrote:

I agree with Alan -- one can get many responses from a properly-configured web server that include a positive number of bytes, but are not what you thought was there.

So what should we conclude, ye philosophers out there, about the existence of the file I requested from www.stata.com? It would seem that one would have to "read" (or at least mechanically interpret) the contents of the result file to see if they make any sense. I don't see that as a great advantage of being able to confirm the existence of a remote file.

Kit
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