Problems importing scaled vars

Scaled vars are a really useful facility in SIR. But as the documentation says: "The major limitation on scaled integers is that the maximum integer value is 2,147,483,643. If scaled to a negative power, this may not be large enough. For example, scaling to -2 for money, gives a maximum value of 21,474,836.43. (For larger money values, use whole cents in a double precision floating point variable:R*8)".

On a recent import from SPSS it gave the following error.

4.2623 grow0000 (-2)/
Invalid variable type. (Error 510 - GROW0000)

This was caused by a value label with a value assigned as 999999999 which SIR checked and finding that it was bigger than the limit, and converted to a R*8 and dropped the scaling. There were no values in the data bigger than the limit, so removing the value label prior to import got us back on track.