topic SAS Macro Governance in SAS Programming

SAS Macro Governance

osmelbrito — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 22:15:26 GMT

Hi everyone

One problem we are facing with SAS is the governance of macros (programs and variables) that we were building lately.

We have a lot of macros and we want to inform our sas users their existence and push them to use it. Any thoughts about it?

Re: SAS Macro Governance

SASKiwi — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 22:39:13 GMT

Set your macros up in AUTOCALL libraries then add a SASAUTOS option in your SAS server's AUTOEXEC to point to these automatically for all SAS sessions:

libname OURAUTOS "OurAUTOCALLMacroLibraryFolder";
options sasautos = (OURAUTOS, SASAUTOS);

Putting your macro library first will ensure your resolve before the SAS ones.

Documenting them on a web page so it is easy for SAS users to find is worth considering.

Re: SAS Macro Governance

ChrisNZ — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 04:25:24 GMT

I also find that having a help call for macros where %macroname(help) works for all macros,and prints a help page helps.

You could also write a %macrolist macro that lists the available macros and a short description.

Finally, having sensible and coherent names helps too.

Re: SAS Macro Governance

ballardw — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 16:18:54 GMT

@ChrisNZ wrote:

I also find that having a help call for macros where %macroname(help) works for all macros,and prints a help page helps.

You could also write a %macrolist macro that lists the available macros and a short description.

Finally, having sensible and coherent names helps too.

There are examples of one way of accomplishing this in the SAS supplied %SGANNO macro (and the %annomac if SAS Graph is available)

Re: SAS Macro Governance

Quentin — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:50:33 GMT

Agree with the autocall route and documenting the macros on a web page.

I wrote a paper a long time ago about automating generation of an html index of a macro library by having a standardized code header in each .sas file, and then using SAS to read in the headers and parse them and write a report via ODS HTML. https://www.lexjansen.com/nesug/nesug04/po/po04.pdf

But I think rather than roll your own, you might look into something like Doxygen https://www.doxygen.nl/index.html for building documentation from code. I think that is what @AllanBowe uses to build documentation for his macro library. If you open any of the .sas files in https://github.com/sasjs/core/tree/main/base. You can see the @ tags for the data in the header.