topic Re: has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS? in SAS Visual Analytics

has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS?

marygraceC — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 22:08:17 GMT

i am looking for a quick way to represent the various data sets in my SAS program as database symbols,

connect them with diamond shapes to represent decision points and finally a shape for a data table or REPORT - just as you would depict a flow chart

of the logic contained in a computer program that involves ETL and Analytics.

I know EG has a PROCESS FLOW option we can select under VIEW -- but maybe there is another graphic package that is available with VA?

and YES and a user pointed out in 2010 --- SAS/OR and NETGRAPH can accomplish a flow chart looking visual -- but that is overly complicated for my current task....

Re: has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS?

justin_sas — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:52:14 GMT

Unfortunately SAS Visual Analytics out of the box doesn’t have the ability to create flowchart like visuals and save them as PDF’s. Though I believe you can probably do this with SAS/Graph using the annotate functionality and then either call the code via a Stored Process and print to PDF in SAS Visual Analytics, or use ODS PDF wrapping your annotate code to create the PDF.

I have cross posted this in the SAS/Graph community to see if they have more ideas for you.

Re: has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS?

GraphGuy — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 20:24:19 GMT

If creating these with SAS/OR and Netgraph is overly complicated, creating them (using custom annotate code, etc) in SAS/Graph probably would be overly complicated too I do not know of an easy way to create such diagrams in SAS/Graph.

Re: has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS?

Quentin — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:09:04 GMT

If you are willing to draw the flow chart in Word (RTF), and then use SAS to update it with names of datasets, counts of records, etc. I like this approach from Art Carpenter.

www.wuss.org/proceedings11/Papers_Carpenter_A_74920.pdf

But that's not really what you were looking for...

Re: has anyone built flowcharts to save as PDFs from SAS?

snoopy369 — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 22:13:13 GMT

You could probably do this with custom markers in a scatter plot on top of a dendrogram perhaps (assuming you need branching) or a series plot (if you don't need branching), but I second Rob's opinion - it's probably more complicated than you'd want. Would be nice if we had a "Flowchart" graph type