topic Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7) in SAS Enterprise Guide

How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

mftuchman — Sat, 25 Jan 2020 19:01:16 GMT

As projects get bigger, I often find myself looking for where I defined a certain code snippet or variable. In an ideal world, I would name my nodes as suggestively as possible, so I can narrow down the answers. But sometimes, I just need to search. If I wanted to find all places in a project where a certain string was used, I *could* export the entire project to a .sas file, and then search that. It works, but it's suboptimal, and I have to do it again every time the project changes.

What I would like to be able to do, is enter in a string, and then tab through all the nodes where that string is involved. For example, if I define X in query builder through a computed variable, I would want to see that node if I searched for X. If it's a code node, then pop open an editing window and go to the first occurrence of a string. Does EG have anything like that?

Since this is a general feature question, there is no code or example data. Will EG 8 have this?

Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

SASKiwi — Sat, 25 Jan 2020 21:51:35 GMT

@mftuchman - I suggest checking this out: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2013/01/25/egp-search-tool2/

Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

mftuchman — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 18:52:09 GMT

I suspect I'm not allowed to download and install that package. I would need to wait for this to be a fully integrated feature of EG. My version is 8.2

Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

AlanC — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:11:19 GMT

An EG project is a zip file with XML files. Using any language (I suggest C#), read the zip file and do a search across all XML nodes. Use XPath to simplify the search once you know the node pattern.

Not as clean as an integrated approach, I agree, but it would work. You could also create a custom Task in EG but that is more complex. A simple console app can be done fast and easy.

Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

SASKiwi — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:58:04 GMT

@mftuchman - The search tool looks like it has been around since 2012 so if you want it added as a feature in EG I recommend you raise a SASware ballot suggestion.

Re: How do I Search all nodes of an EG project (version 7.15 HF7)

TomKari — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 23:03:18 GMT

Another option is that since SAS can read .zip files, you could develop a searching solution in SAS to search EG projects (my head's starting to hurt!)

Tom