topic Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments in Administration and Deployment

Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO,SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

srinijareddy — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 13:56:18 GMT

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 13:51:12 GMT

SAS® 9.4 Macro Language: Reference

Macro programming is not dependent on the user interface or the runmode.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

srinijareddy — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 13:59:06 GMT

Okay. But I want to know that can I find any basic explanations on how macros will be used in different environments

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:13:11 GMT

@srinijareddy wrote:
Okay. But I want to know that can I find any basic explanations on how macros will be used in different environments

Just in case it has escaped you:

Macro programming is not dependent on the user interface or the runmode.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

ballardw — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:15:36 GMT

@srinijareddy wrote:
Okay. But I want to know that can I find any basic explanations on how macros will be used in different environments

The SAS macro language writes code statements.

There will not be any difference in behavior for the generated statements by "environment" than if you wrote the code and ran it.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

DavidHD — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:19:55 GMT

While I generally agree I would add to this, that the run mode can have an influence if different autoexec are used because of e.g. different server context (SAS App vs SAS DI as a concrete example).

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:31:07 GMT

@DavidHD wrote:
While I generally agree I would add to this, that the run mode can have an influence if different autoexec are used because of e.g. different server context (SAS App vs SAS DI as a concrete example).

You could have different macro parameters/variables, yes, but the macro language will be the same.

And changes between environments would be site-specific and documented there, but not in any publicly available resource.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

JackHamilton — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 19:21:40 GMT

>> The SAS macro language writes code statements. <<

That's a narrow view of what the macro facility can do. It can also prompt the user for input, read to and write from external files, obtain information about the programming environment, and create librefs and filerefs, all without generating any non-macro code.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

ballardw — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:21:18 GMT

@JackHamilton wrote:

>> The SAS macro language writes code statements. <<

That's a narrow view of what the macro facility can do. It can also prompt the user for input, read to and write from external files, obtain information about the programming environment, and create librefs and filerefs, all without generating any non-macro code.

Yes you can write a lot of Fopen, and related read and write stuff. ALL of it uses datastep functions with %sysfunc, which statement was not available when I first delved into learning macro code with SAS 5.

So I would not consider that a pure macro facility. In fact in many ways obfuscating stuff that may be better done with a data step.

If by "prompt for use input" by using the %window code, same thing basically as Window from the data step. If the later EG "prompt" that is not the quite the same a using pure macro code to get such in general.

I pity anyone going down the road of writing 50 page reports using %sysfunc(Fput,id,%somemacrovalue) statements.

Re: Can I get document on how we use macros in SAS STUDIO%2C SAS PC and SAS BATCH Environments

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 11:36:42 GMT

Prompting for user input from code is largely obsolete, as defined user prompts for EG nodes and stored processes have taken over that functionality. User inputs from code can't be done in a client/server environment.