WF2

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javiersan
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Joined: Mon Jan 19, 2009 8:18 am

WF2

Postby javiersan » Sat Dec 12, 2020 3:27 am

Hi, on EV12, could you please explain what's the advantage of saving on WF2 format rather than WF1?
Thanks

Javier

EViews Steve
EViews Developer
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Location: Irvine, CA

Re: WF2

Postby EViews Steve » Sun Dec 13, 2020 12:27 am

Basically, the WF2 format is our attempt to offer a more open format that can be understood and parsed by anyone with basic JSON knowledge. Because it can be a simple JSON text file (with gzip compression turned off), you can open it using any text editor and do simple grep/text searches to find elements or objects scattered throughout the file. And of course you can use any JSON parser library to read the WF2 file for any EViews data & results that were previously saved, especially for any elements that we didn't provide any standard way of retrieving programmatically before. With the WF2 file format, ALL EViews data & meta-data is available programmatically.

And depending on your data, it's very possible for a compressed/un-formatted WF2 file to be smaller in size than the corresponding WF1 file.

Once caveat is that it can take EViews a bit more time to save & open WF2 files compared to WF1, especially for much larger workfiles ( > 100MB). So if you are using large workfiles and performance is a concern, you will want to stay with WF1 and mainly use WF2 as an output format only whenever needed.

Steve

startz
Non-normality and collinearity are NOT problems!
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Re: WF2

Postby startz » Sun Dec 13, 2020 7:58 am

Is the wf2 format documented publicly?

EViews Gareth
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Re: WF2

Postby EViews Gareth » Sun Dec 13, 2020 9:14 am

To further what Steve said, for the typical user there isn't much benefit right now, other than possibly smaller file size.

WF2 was introduced so that other institutions/companies can build applications that can read and write files that EViews can use - and not only data objects, but also estimation objects. Thus it is possible for external companies to build an application that can take an EViews file and read the results of an equation, or modify them.
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EViews Steve
EViews Developer
Posts: 788
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2008 3:00 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Re: WF2

Postby EViews Steve » Mon Dec 14, 2020 9:10 am

startz wrote:Is the wf2 format documented publicly?


At this point, no. But we like to think our JSON file format is mostly self-explanatory. We may release a full JSON spec in the future, but if you attempt to read it and you have questions about a particular element, send an email to support@eviews.com or post a question in our forum and I'll try to answer it for you.

Steve


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