Passing Information to Programs in Batch Mode

It is often desirable to pass information to an IMLPlus program from the command line used to run it. You may want to specify the name of a data set or the names of variables. IMLPlus.exe enables you to pass up to 32 named parameters to an IMLPlus program.

Each command-line parameter has a name and a value. The syntax for defining a command-line parameter is:

-d name=value

or

-d name="value"

A command-line parameter's name must conform to the following rules:

• A name must be at least one character long.
• There is no limit to the length of a name.
• A name may contain any character except the space character and the equals sign character (=).

Command-line parameter names are not case sensitive.

A command-line parameter's value must conform to the following rules:

• A value may be empty (i.e. name= or name=""). In this case it is not possible for the IMLPlus program to determine whether the parameter is not defined or is defined as an empty string.
• There is no limit to the length of a value.
• A value may contain any character.
• If a value contains one or more spaces, the value must be enclosed in double quotation marks. In this case the value must not contain any double quotation marks.
• If a value is not enclosed in double quotation marks, the value may contain embedded double quotation marks.

An IMLPlus program can retrieve the value of a command-line parameter by using the method Runtime.GetCommandLineParameter.

Example

Suppose the file Example.sx contains the following IMLPlus program:

declare DataObject dobj;
dataset = Runtime.GetCommandLineParameter( "DataSet" );
dobj = DataObject.CreateFromFile( dataset );
xvar = Runtime.GetCommandLineParameter( "X" );
yvar = Runtime.GetCommandLineParameter( "Y" );
declare ScatterPlot plot;
plot = ScatterPlot.Create( dobj, xvar, yvar );
PlotFileName = Runtime.GetCommandLineParameter( "PlotFileName" );
plot.SaveToFile( PlotFileName, 800, 533 );

The following invocation of IMLPlus.exe will run the program:

imlplus Example.sx -d dataset=baseball -d x=no_hits -d y=no_runs -d plotfilename=Example.bmp

If everything runs correctly, this program will create a bitmap graphics file called Example.bmp that contains a scatter plot of the variables NO_HITS and NO_RUNS from the data set baseball.sas7bdat.