How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

[mftuchman]

As projects get bigger, I often find myself looking for where I defined a certain code snippet or variable.  In an ideal world, I would name my nodes as suggestively as possible, so I can narrow down the answers.   But sometimes, I just need to search.   If I wanted to find all places in a project where a certain string was used, I *could* export the entire project to a .sas file,  and then search that.  It works, but it's suboptimal, and I have to do it again every time the project changes.

What I would like to be able to do, is enter in a string, and then tab through all the nodes where that string is involved.  For example, if I define X in query builder through a computed variable, I would want to see that node if I searched for X.   If it's a code node, then pop open an editing window and go to the first occurrence of a string.  Does EG have anything like that?

Since this is a general feature question, there is no code or example data.  Will EG 8 have this?

[SASKiwi]

@mftuchman  - I suggest checking this out: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2013/01/25/egp-search-tool2/

[mftuchman]

I suspect I'm not allowed to download and install that package. I would need to wait for this to be a fully integrated feature of EG.   My version is 8.2

[AlanC]

An EG project is a zip file with XML files. Using any language (I suggest C#), read the zip file and do a search across all XML nodes. Use XPath to simplify the search once you know the node pattern. 

Not as clean as an integrated approach, I agree, but it would work. You could also create a custom Task in EG but that is more complex. A simple console app can be done fast and easy.

[SASKiwi]

@mftuchman  - The search tool looks like it has been around since 2012 so if you want it added as a feature in EG I recommend you raise a SASware ballot suggestion. 

[TomKari]

Another option is that since SAS can read .zip files, you could develop a searching solution in SAS to search EG projects (my head's starting to hurt!)

Tom