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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerNovember 9, 2012 0

Using a SAS function to validate a National Provider ID (NPI) value

We are careening towards the holiday season, and this year more than ever before it's going to mean one thing: Online Shopping. As you enter your credit card number over and over to complete your many purchases, you might occasionally transpose or mistype your account number. Does it surprise you

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallNovember 5, 2012 0

Cleaner OLAP cube physical folder structures

Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 29, 2012 0

Using source control management with SAS Enterprise Guide

I work on a variety of projects at SAS, most of which require some level of team collaboration in source management systems. Due to the many technologies that we work with, SAS developers use different source management tools for different purposes. I've got projects in CVS, Subversion, and Git. When

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 29, 2012 0

So many autoexecs; three tips for BI administrators

BASE SAS users are already familiar with the autoexec file. This is a .sas file that typically resides in the installation folder of the SAS executable. Instructions for setting it up in UNIX, Windows, and other environments is readily available on the SAS website. In SAS BI configurations there are

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 19, 2012 0

Creating a somewhat unique ID using the UUIDGEN function

According to the Daily Writing Tips blog, describing a thing as "somewhat unique" is bad form. Unique means "one of a kind", so either it is or it is not. The famous example (which the style police will use to chide you) is that you can't have something as "somewhat

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 15, 2012 0

Go on a date with SAS BI Dashboard, part 2

Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 9, 2012 0

Special automatic macro variables available in SAS Enterprise Guide

You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often

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Programming Tips

Robert AllisonOctober 5, 2012 0

Custom SAS graphs = competitive advantage

SAS/GRAPH gives you the ability to customize your graphs (or even create totally new types of custom graphs) ... and it is my firm belief that it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to "make sense" of your data in ways your competitors can't. Most of the examples in

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Programming Tips

Robert AllisonSeptember 26, 2012 0

Adding pop-up graphs to your SAS/GRAPHs

By now, most of you probably already know how to add drill downs and hover text to your SAS graphs. But did you know you can add pop-up images and graphs? Here are a couple of examples ... In this first example, when you hover your mouse over each state, you

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Programming Tips

Miss SAS AnswersSeptember 19, 2012 0

Selecting the Second Duplicate Observation

Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have read through a few Dear Miss SAS Answers blog posts, but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. I need to extract only the second duplicate from a whole list of duplicates per account number. Is there a way to

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerSeptember 18, 2012 0

HAVING (clause) fun with SAS Enterprise Guide

Last week I attended a meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society. (Okay, I didn't just attend; I was a presenter as well.) This user group meeting contained a feature that I had never seen before: "Solutions to the Posed Problem". Weeks before the meeting, an "open problem" was posted

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallSeptember 17, 2012 0

Always learning something new, two awesome Enterprise Guide tricks

Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 31, 2012 0

The case for XCMD privileges in SAS Enterprise Guide

One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 22, 2012 0

Using a regular expression to validate a SAS variable name

Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 15, 2012 0

Comparing data set schemas in SAS

The project that I'm currently working on requires several input data tables, and those tables must have a specific schema. That is, each input table must contain columns of a specific name, type, and length in order for the rest of the system to function correctly. The schema requirements aren't

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 14, 2012 0

How to get your SAS data set attributes into Excel

I'm working on a SAS programming project with a large team. Each team member is responsible for a piece of the overall system, and the "contract" for how it all fits together is The Data. For example, I've got a piece that performs some data manipulation and produces several output

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 31, 2012 0

Visualizing evidence of a black hole, with a gif animation

Hopefully you know that a gif animation can be used for more than just showing a cartoon animal doing cute tricks! Being a savvy data-meister, I'm sure you are also aware that you can use gif animations to see how data changes over time. But perhaps you didn't know you could

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 30, 2012 0

How to get the statistics you need from SAS Enterprise Guide

If you need to calculate the mean, sum, standard deviation, or frequency count for a variable, you'll find it pretty easy to accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide. The corresponding tasks in the menus have names like "Summary Statistics" or "One-way Frequencies". Obvious, right? Often, researchers or students have a quest

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 16, 2012 0

Listing the data sets in a library within your custom task

A SAS Professionals attendee and Twitter follower named Marco asks for help: ..struggling to find a method with custom tasks in EG to be able to list the datasets in a library, can you help please? Sure, no problem. This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. First, make sure that you have a reference

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 6, 2012 0

Counting how many times a web link has been shared on Twitter or Facebook

Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of

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Programming Tips

Waynette TubbsJune 26, 2012 0

How to mimic the N function for character variables using Data Step, PROC SQL

Many of you know Mike Zdeb. He's a long-time SAS user and frequent presenter at SAS conferences. Zdeb is also a reviewer of many SAS Press books and author of his own SAS book, Maps Made Easy Using SAS. Zdeb contacted me after he read the May SAS Tech Report

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Programming Tips

Sunil GuptaJune 20, 2012 0

Something for nothing? Adding group descriptive statistics

Can you actually get something for nothing? With PROC SQL’s subquery and remerging features, yes, you can. Often there is a need to add group descriptive statistics such as group counts, minimum and maximum values for further by-group processing. Instead of first creating the group count, minimum or maximum values

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 18, 2012 0

Code wizards make the magic happen

Wizard Harry Potter makes magic just waving his wand around and shouting out spells. Using SAS Enterprise Guide (and you are welcome to shout out your own commands too) you can create some magic, allowing the Stored Process Wizard to code for you. On Step 2, the "Include code for"

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJune 14, 2012 0

Read a Microsoft datetime value into a SAS datetime value

A colleague was recently working with a web service that supplies some datetime values using the Microsoft Windows internal representation. He called the web service to retrieve those values (along with other data) from SAS, and he needed convert these values to SAS date-time values. The Microsoft definition for a

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 12, 2012 0

How did you find that metadata?

A common question really and one that I get after posting code like yesterday's All SAS Stored Process Locations Report. The neat trick is just to type METABROWSE in a BASE SAS command window. (There are two other commands: METACON and METAFIND. Has anyone got any tips on when those

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 11, 2012 0

Where is the SAS code for that stored process?

Stored process code can exist within the metadata itself for version 9.3 (the benefits of which I discussed earlier). But for all other versions (and as a option in version 9.3) the SAS code is stored as a .sas file within the server's file system (or mapped folder/drive structure). When editing

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 8, 2012 0

Selecting multiple individual dates in prompted reports

The date prompt from SAS Prompt Framework provides the options of single selection or a range, however what if you need to select multiple individual dates such as Monday (May 28), Wednesday (May 30), and Friday (June 1) of last week? There are a few alternatives to accomplishing this. Option

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJune 7, 2012 0

How to search your SAS Enterprise Guide project files using automation

If you are like many SAS Enterprise Guide users, you've amassed a large collection of project files (EGP files) that contain important content: programs, logs, notes, results, and more. However, to most tools and processes, the EGP file is opaque. That is, you can't see what's inside of it unless

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 7, 2012 0

Change your passwords without locking out your connection

Did you change your LinkedIn password yesterday? (If you didn’t, you should!) But did it happen to be the same as your corporate password? First, tisk tisk. Second, change your corporate password NOW! Ok, now that this is done ~ don’t let your saved connection profile for SAS applications lock

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Open Stored Process GUI with Copy Selection

Angela HallJune 6, 2012 0

Backup or copy all components of your stored process before making changes

What if you would like to make a copy of an existing stored process to test out your changes before making them live? The copy command is available from within SAS Management Console or from the SAS Enterprise Guide Open Stored Process GUI as seen below (note you can only

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