gvegayon / parallel

PARALLEL: Stata module for parallel computing
https://rawgit.com/gvegayon/parallel/master/ado/parallel.html
MIT License
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Correct debugging in parallel append #86

Open eacabbi opened 4 years ago

eacabbi commented 4 years ago

I recently encountered an issue in parallel append.

While running a code that had to adapt to different years (I am analyzing an administrative dataset which changed the definitions and, most importantly, the formats of some variables across years) I got an error message "FILE_NAME_yyyy not found" for some of my years of analysis at the time in which, after that my code had correctly run, an append needed to be performed.

After some debugging I understood that the problem was not that the files did not actually exist (they did, and the codes within parallel had run correctly), but that the append command was failing because of the fact that some variables with same names across years had different formats (number vs string).

If possible, it'd be great to correct the error message in that case, as the issue is not that files are not found, but that the append fails because of formats issues (importantly, the issue is intuitive but never mentioned in the help, so it would also be great to mention it).

gvegayon commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the report. We will add this as a suggestion for the next version.

eacabbi commented 4 years ago

thanks to you guys!