topic question about proc report with flow option in SAS Programming

question about proc report with flow option

wxzhai — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 15:38:00 GMT

Hi, I'm practicing the following program on the book of learning sas through examples on SAS Studio. But the result is not as demonstrated on the book, there's no line wrapping, no expected column widths... I dont know why? Thanks in advance!

Program 15.7: Demonstrating the FLOW Option with PROC REPORT
title "Demonstrating the FLOW Option";
proc report data=Learn.Medical headline
split=' ' ls=74;
column Patno VisitDate DX HR Weight Comment;
define Patno / "Patient Number" width=7;
define VisitDate / "Visit Date" width=9 format=date9.;
define DX / "DX Code" width=4 right;
define HR / "Heart Rate" width=6;
define Weight / width=6;
define Comment / width=30 flow;
run;

Re: question about proc report with flow option

ballardw — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 20:17:11 GMT

Flow and width options only apply to the LISTING output destination.

For example from the on line help:

FLOW

wraps the value of a character variable in its column. The FLOW option honors the split character. If the text contains no split character, then PROC REPORT tries to split text at a blank.

Restriction This option affects only the LISTING output. It has no affect on other ODS output.

Unless you have an ODS LISTING, or have changed the output to listing you will not see the Flow behavior in HTML, RTF, PDF, EXCEL or any other ODS destination.

Because Proc Report has been around a long time it has many options involved for sending output essentially direct to line printers or text files that emulate line priter behavior, which is ODS LISTING. If you do not include an option to send the output to LISTING you will not see any change in output.

@wxzhai wrote:

Hi, I'm practicing the following program on the book of learning sas through examples on SAS Studio. But the result is not as demonstrated on the book, there's no line wrapping, no expected column widths... I dont know why? Thanks in advance!

Program 15.7: Demonstrating the FLOW Option with PROC REPORT
title "Demonstrating the FLOW Option";
proc report data=Learn.Medical headline
split=' ' ls=74;
column Patno VisitDate DX HR Weight Comment;
define Patno / "Patient Number" width=7;
define VisitDate / "Visit Date" width=9 format=date9.;
define DX / "DX Code" width=4 right;
define HR / "Heart Rate" width=6;
define Weight / width=6;
define Comment / width=30 flow;
run;

Re: question about proc report with flow option

wxzhai — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 14:13:01 GMT

Thank you!

Do you mean something like this:

ods listing;

title "Demonstrating the FLOW Option";
proc report data=Learn.Medical headline
split=' ' ls=74;
column Patno VisitDate DX HR Weight Comment;
define Patno / "Patient Number" width=7;
define VisitDate / "Visit Date" width=9 format=date9.;
define DX / "DX Code" width=4 right;
define HR / "Heart Rate" width=6;
define Weight / width=6;
define Comment / width=30 flow;
run;

Re: question about proc report with flow option

ballardw — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 14:43:13 GMT

Yes but you will have to look to the listing output window, not the typical "results" window.

Re: question about proc report with flow option

wxzhai — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:17:24 GMT

But I can't see the listing window you said. The following is what my SAS studio shows:

Re: question about proc report with flow option

Tom — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:38:53 GMT

For some unknown reason SAS does not have any feature in SAS/Studio to display normal output files. Only the LOG and ODS outputs.

Write the output to a file and then open it yourself.

ods listing file="~/listing.txt";

You could add a step to dump the file to the log.

data _null_;
  infile "~/listing.txt";
  input;
  put _infile_;
run;

Re: question about proc report with flow option

wxzhai — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 16:16:21 GMT

Thank you so much! It worked.