An EViews user object is a custom object that can contain data and objects and may offer views and procedures. In its simplest form, a user object is a storage container for EViews objects. More sophisticated user objects also provide views and procs that allow you to run EViews programs to perform various tasks and display results. These latter objects work almost identically to built-in EViews objects such as a series or equation.

In the discussion to follow it will be important to distinguish between user objects that are unregistered or registered:

A relatively complex registered user object might be a complete econometric estimator. Each time a new instance of the estimator object is created, it could specify and perform estimation, saving results inside the user object in the form of data objects such as coefficient vectors and covariance matrices. The object could also offer views such as coefficient tests and procs to perform forecasting. And like an EViews equation object, you may have multiple instances of this estimator in the workfile, each corresponding to a different set of estimates.

We note that a registered user object need not be particularly complex. For example, you could have a simple user object called “RESULTS” that contains a collection of graphs, tables, and estimation objects obtained from a particular form of analysis. You could define simple views for your user object that display the stored tables or graphs, and define procs that let you extract those tables or graphs into new EViews objects. Registering the object allows you to have multiple results objects in your workfile.