topic Re: Variable for the description of the DIS job in SAS Data Management

Variable for the description of the DIS job

Babloo — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 10:21:58 GMT

I want to create one variable called DESCRIPTION which should have the value as description of the Job. Assume one Job is calculating weight of the student and it is mentioned in the description of the Job, then I need the value as "weight of the student" in a variable DESCRIPTION.

I already checked the generated code of the DIS Jobs and no Job holds the value of the description of the Job in any macro variable neither it don't seem to be stored any where.

Appriciate if someone of you shed some light on this exercise.

Re: Variable for the description of the DIS job

JosvanderVelden — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 17:56:03 GMT

Maybe you need to use DATA Step Functions for Reading and Writing Metadata. Doc: https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lrmeta&docsetTarget=p0o5rdel8tgzgsn1iqhdwybgui7k.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

Re: Variable for the description of the DIS job

Babloo — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 18:43:44 GMT

Should I use Metadata_Appprop data step function?

Re: Variable for the description of the DIS job

Patrick — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 01:09:20 GMT

@Babloo

Full points that you first inspected the DIS generated code to see what's available. You might have seen that DIS creates macro variable &JobID. Using this macro variable the following should work.

data _null_;
  length Description $256;
  rc=metadata_getattr("OMSOBJ:Job?@Id = '&jobID'","Desc",Description);
  call symputx('Description', Description);
  put rc=;
  put Description=;
  stop;
run;

%put &=Description;

Above based on docu sample code from here:

https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lrmeta&docsetTarget=p1kjy5liyi86w8n1vfopazyeb70u.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

And to figure out the attribute names for a metadata object refer to documentation here:

https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/omamodref/67417/HTML/default/viewer.htm#job.htm

Querying SAS Metadata is often not that simple. Luckily here we just had to get the attribute of an object where we knew the Id already.