Make JMP Journal Transportable

Question

JMP supports talks about "Building a JMP Journal Presentation".

How can you create a journal that will still work when it is:

Transported to another computer, possible switching between Windows and Mac,

Viewable from a USB drive, no matter what drive/folder the host mounts the drive in.

Daniel_Valente · Answer

What I normally do is put an analysis project in a single folder and change the link references from full to local references. For example here is a directory related to a recent presentation I gave. The journal is in the folder with all the supporting files. 
In my journal, I then reference the data sets and supporting files with their local path (which is inherently cross-platform). For example:

open("FMHPI-Final.jmp");

vs. the absolute path of the file on my computer. Nested folders are OK too, you just need to reference the folder and file, e.g.

open ("/subFolder/file.jmp");

If you use the context menu in the journal to add references, you have two options:

* Remove the absolute path and just leave the name of the file.
* Use something like @brady_brady's journal packager addin, which will make the process of sharing your journals with others much easier (as it automatically wraps everything up into a single folder and generates local references).

I personally just organize each project into a folder that has all of the data sets and supporting materials, and then always use local references in my journals. Since I often have to switch hosts from Mac to Windows, this assures that the links will work. Sharing also becomes easy as I can zip the whole folder up and share the zip file. The consumer of the presentation then simply unzips the presentation and everything will work for them. I beleive this strategy works for both of the OP's use cases.

Dan_Obermiller · Answer

Could you have the link in the journal re-create the data table rather than a reference to a specific directory? This may make the journal large depending on the size of the data table, but it may be a viable option.

David_Burnham · Answer

The usual problem is with path names for files.  JMP saves full path names which make the journal file difficult to transport. One option is to edit the scripts and change them to relative path names (the easiest thing to do is have your tables and journal all in the same folder).  This option tends not to work for me because I fail to check all the scripts, so I prefer to avoid the problem in the first place: the option "save to journal" will include a reference to the data table path whereas the option "save to script window" generates the script for producing the output without explicit references to the table.  So I always save to the script window, then manually add the scripts to the journal.  This way I can have one button to open the table, and other buttons to perform actions on that table.  The action buttons I show as hyperlinks (underscore property) wheras the open table buttons I show as buttons.