topic Re: Log Summary suggestion in SAS Enterprise Guide

Log Summary suggestion

PeterKellberg — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 14:45:55 GMT

Hi all,

EG has a neat feature "Log Summary" where you can filter the log to see maybe only the errors:

There are however some NOTES: that (maybe) should get attention:

variable XXX is uninitialized
- often (but not always) a misspelled variable name
The data set XXX has 0 observations
- An issue if you expect one or more obs
There were 0 observations read ...
- Same
The data set XXX has 0 variables
- A dataset without variables?
Invalid numeric data,
- SAS gets text where numeric data is expected
Invalid argument to function
- for many reasons
Mathematical operations could not be performed
- several reasons
values have been converted to
- implicit type conversion - is it OK with you?
MERGE statement has more than one data set with repeats
- duplicate keys on more than one dataset (unpredictable results)

Would it be foolish to suggest a new group fx. "Attentions" that highlighted the NOTES mentioned above?

10 years ago we developed a SAS Macro "LogSummary" that can be used in the SAS Display Manager (SAS Classic) and in batch-mode. It gives you an overview of problems in the log including the suspicious NOTES. Users transitioning to Enterprise Guide simply misses that feature.

Regards,

Peter

Re: Log Summary suggestion

CaseySmith — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 03:38:00 GMT

Hi Peter,

I like your suggestion. I can certainly see how it would be useful.

Since we probably wouldn't be successful at hard-coding everything all users would be interested in, I was thinking we might even be able to take it a step further and provide full flexibility by allowing users to define one or more custom searches.

For example:

The existing Errors, Warnings, and Notes toggle buttons would be built-in (always present), but then there could be a '+' icon to the right of those that when clicked would add a new custom toggle button to the end for which you would define a label and a search criteria (ex. regular expression). The custom search would behave the same as the built-in ones for Errors, Warnings, and Notes, but would return log lines that match the user-specified search criteria instead. You could click the '+' icon again to define additional custom searches/toggle buttons.

Would that sufficiently meet your needs? (It would require you to define your desired custom searches. Although, perhaps we could have some presets (like the ones you mentioned above) to choose from when defining a new custom search.)

Thanks for the feedback!

Casey

Re: Log Summary suggestion

PeterKellberg — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 12:01:24 GMT

Hi Casey,

Sounds like a great idea - I like it. More flexible that way. All labels and a search criterias should then be stored in the egoptions or some other XML file. That will make it easier distribute a standard setting to our potential 200 EG Users in Statistics Denmark.

"Although, perhaps we could have some presets (like the ones you mentioned above) to choose from when defining a new custom search.)" - agree 😉

Thank you for your attention, Casey.

Kindly,

Peter

Re: Log Summary suggestion

admuresan — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 21:18:01 GMT

This is an awesome idea, and I have been trying to find a way to do this as I came across this post.

Was this implemented?

Re: Log Summary suggestion

PeterKellberg — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 06:40:20 GMT

Hi,

As for EG version 7.15 - nope it is not. Does anyone of you by any chance know if the log from a program in EG resides in a file?

Regards, Peter

Re: Log Summary suggestion

andreas_lds — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 08:19:12 GMT

@PeterKellberg wrote:

Hi,

As for EG version 7.15 - nope it is not. Does anyone of you by any chance know if the log from a program in EG resides in a file?

Regards, Peter

The Enterprise-Guide-Project-Files are just zips with funky file-extension. So you could unzip them, but of course not while the project is in use. Redirecting the log is possible, but then the log-tab in EG remains empty if done - not that useful.

Re: Log Summary suggestion

CaseySmith — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 15:31:49 GMT

It is still on our list for future consideration, but no, it has not been implemented yet, and will not be in our next release (EG 8.1).

Casey