topic How can a stored process know which application invoked it? in Developers

How can a stored process know which application invoked it?

Quentin — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:44:55 GMT

Seems a benefit of stored processes is that a single stored process could be invoked by lots of different applications (web report studio, stored process web app, EG, office-add on, information delivery portal, blah blah).

Sometimes the code executed should vary, depending on which application invoked the process. For example, a stored process might give user option of using a prompt to set _odsdest= html | rtf | pdf. If that stored process is invoked from SPWA, all should be fine. But if it is invoked from office-add on and user selects PDF, the stored process should force the destination to be rtf or html, because Excel knows not of pdf. Or maybe I am coding a javascript alert, which I guess would only work when the process is called from SPWA or IDP.

Is there a macro variable (or other environment variable) that can reliably indicate what sort of app invoked the stored process? So I would use it the same way as in vanilla SAS, I use &SYSENV to determine if code is being run in interactive mode or batch?

Thanks,

--Q.

Re: How can a stored process know which application invoked it?

Cynthia_sas — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:38:56 GMT

Hi:

One thing that I do is test the value or existence of the automatic variable &_URL -- if it has a value, then the stored process was requested by either the IDP or the SPWA. If &_URL is not in the global symbol table, then the stored process was requested by a different client app. If you are allowing the users to select a value for destination, then of course, you can test the value of &_ODSDEST -- if they were using RTF or PDF, for example, you might not use your code that inserts JavaScript.. but for JavaScript, testing &_URL is probably more reliable than &_ODSDEST.

In some instances, &_CLIENT might give you something usable. But, if the CLIENT cannot be determined, then you get just server info. New with 9.3 is &_MSOFFICECLIENT, whose value will tell you the name of the Office client (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook) that made a request for a stored process.

The bottom line is that you'd have to code some tests, probably in a macro program inside your stored process. The full list of reserved macro variables differed in earlier versions of SAS. This is the list for 9.3 in the doc:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/stpug/62758/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p184mqqbi9w6qjn1q0619x19eg02.htm

cynthia

Re: How can a stored process know which application invoked it?

Quentin — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:18:21 GMT

Thanks Cynthia,

Looks like I can get most of the way by testing &_URL and &_MSOFFICECLIENT.

--Q.