ChrisHemedinger Tracker

Re: Announcement: saspytest - the new unit testing framework for SAS code

ChrisHemedinger — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:58:10 GMT

Thanks for this contribution! @snoopy369 has been entertaining/educating SAS programmers with Claude skills via at various conferences, and I wonder if this package can be used together with that technique.

AI-assisted coding is truly helping to bring the SAS programming skill into a new era!

Re: Order list

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:26:42 GMT

If I was doing setting this up, I wouldn't rely only on SYSCC. I would set a macro variable at the end of each step that was a flag for "all good?", depending on conditions.

So, this might be based on SYSCC, or existence of an expected data set, or some other combination of conditions. That will ensure that your next step runs only when all assumed "good" conditions have been satisfied.

Re: Order list

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:31:15 GMT

Yes, SYSCC is automatic and will have a non-zero value if an error occurs. But you can/should clear it with "%let SYSCC=0;" to reset it when you want to start from a clean slate.

SYSERR is another automatic variable, but you cannot reset that in the session (it is read-only).

Re: Order list

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:49:48 GMT

You should be able to add a Condition to the item in your process flow. The condition can be based on different criteria, but the easiest method is to check a macro variable. You can use SYSCC (built in error code that you can reset), or you can set a macro variable to indicate some other "error" condition (such as a data set that doesn't exist).

When you add your items to the Ordered List, the condition is still evaluated and the node won't run if the condition isn't met.

Re: SAS Support Communities metrics and their trends

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:51:19 GMT

Stack Overflow was never the preferred spot for SAS questions, and it doesn't surprise me that the volume has dipped so much.

Stack Overflow was one of those "AI holdout sites" (preferring real answers from real people), but they have had to adjust their stance a bit, even now offering an MCP server and some commercial offerings for orgs who want to use the Stack Overflow platform as a GenAI engine.

Re: PPI - The Pharmaceutical Proceedings Index

ChrisHemedinger — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:54:58 GMT

All of the SAS conference papers (going back to SAS ONE!) are hosted on SAS websites -- contents/index is here:

Re: PPI - The Pharmaceutical Proceedings Index

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:03:10 GMT

Thank you for building this and sharing. Another community member shared their own contribution:

Clinical Standards Hub

Re: Moving SAS® Viya® Contents: A RESTful Way

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:13:29 GMT

@bugraduman1 You could try posting in the Developer forum here with the details.

Re: need help-cannot access SAS studio (SAS OnDemand)

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:58:59 GMT

Hi All,

You can try to contact our Customer Engagement Center to learn more about why this might not be working for you. See Free Online Learning for SAS for more information about what is available.

Re: Email change

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:45:44 GMT

You can do this with self service tools in the SAS Profile. See this note for instructions.

Re: SAS Support Communities metrics and their trends

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:12:00 GMT

Hi All,

As a person who looks after our online community and many of our other digital experiences here, I can confirm that the "traditional" main driver of traffic to the site (Google search) has dropped off significantly. Less traffic means fewer questions, thus fewer solutions being added. Still a valuable experience and it's probably true that we have questions that are less "redundant" or "duplicative", but the volume is lower.

AND, we know that the AI experiences (AI summary in browser, chatbots, copilots) will surface answers from this community -- which is something we are proud of...though it makes it more difficult to measure. I wrote about this recently here:

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2026/06/23/sas-programming-ai-copilot/

We aren't just sitting still though. We are in the process evaluating how to update our community experience to keep its relevance while also providing the AI experiences that people expect. This is an exciting endeavor, but I acknowledge it will be disruptive. (Already, AI has disrupted things...so we have to adapt.) Some of you have been around long enough to remember the last time we significantly updated this platform (2015) -- and a lot has changed since then!

Re: Can't open LexJansen.com

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:11:00 GMT

You may have luck with this recent archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260110121252/https://www.lexjansen.com/

Specifically:

Western Users of SAS Software 2012 proceedings: (archive)

What paper are you interested in? We may be able to find a resource that's newer than 14 years old.

Re: Can't open LexJansen.com

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:58:16 GMT

Hi @tracyedinger,

There is a very sad reason for this. We learned just recently that Lex Jansen, the community volunteer who built and ran this popular site, passed away unexpectedly this week. The site has been down/gone; we don't know the full story as to why. This is very fresh news.

lexjansen.com is/was a tremendous service to index all of this published SAS content to make it easily searchable. But most of the actual published papers are hosted elsewhere. For example, you can find links to all SUGI/SGF/Innovate sessions here:
https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/SUGI-SAS-Global-Forum-SAS-Innovate-Past-Conference-Proceedings/ta-p/863480

PharmaSUG proceedings are at the PharmaSUG site:
https://pharmasug.org/past-conference-proceedings/

Many of the other regional/large conferences are also self-hosting their papers. However, I know Lex did host content for many of the smaller conferences who don't have their own sites.

It's a reminder that the SAS community is so much about the people, not just the technology, and when we lose an active community member like Lex, we all feel the impact. We are very grateful for all that Lex has done for us (and personally, he was just a super nice human being).

Chris

Re: Using SAS Enterprise Guide with your local SAS installation

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:40:09 GMT

@Breepthi Did you try the steps listed in this article? Mainly: make sure EG "sees" your local SAS (Help->About), use No Profile mode, etc?

Re: Scheduling projects in EG with Powershell workaround

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:31 GMT

The reason EG now uses PowerShell is that VBScript has been deprecated in later versions of Windows, and only with special steps from an admin is VBScript made available. So PowerShell is now the preferred/supported mechanism for Windows-based scripting. Steps are documented here.

My suggestion is that you work with your admin to enable PowerShell for this use case; it's more secure/robust than VBScript at this point. If that's not possible, you can write your own VBScript programs to automate EG. I have many examples here:

Re: Displaying SAS Output as a Table in the Email Body

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:50:29 GMT

You can format your email using ODS and HTML. See the examples in .

Excerpt:

FILENAME OUTPUT EMAIL SUBJECT = "blogs.sas.com: &postCount posts, &commentCount comments" FROM = "Chris Hemedinger <chris.blogger@sas.com>" TO = (&toList) CT ='text/html'; ods tagsets.msoffice2k(id=email) file=OUTPUT(title="7-day blog report") style=myemail; proc report nowd data=pastweek; title "&postCount blogs.sas.com posts"; title2 color=red "NOTE: " color=blue "View counts are sourced from Google Analytics"; columns post_date post_author blog_ID post_link ga_views comment_count ; define post_date / group order=data 'Date posted' style(column)=[just=l]; define post_author / order 'Author' style(column)=[just=l]; ... run; ods tagsets.msoffice2k(id=email) close;

Re: Wrong output dataset after using SET and IF-THEN

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:40:14 GMT

Hi,

I see the expected result. In the second observation the value is "yes" but it's empty in obs 1 and 3.

If the DATA step isn't following the logic you expect, I recommend using the DATA step debugger (available in EG and in SAS Studio within Viya) to step through.

Re: Searching communities for exact string %LIST

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:29:22 GMT

Wow, I learned something from this one!

Re: Searching communities for exact string %LIST

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:28:36 GMT

I'm afraid this is a search "black hole" -- the percent symbol gets escaped in the URL (because the internet decided % and & are meant for URL directives and not for SAS macros, even though SAS macro has been around longer). The Google site search is the best workaround that I can think of.

I searched ALL message titles (I have that data) and none mention %LIST in the subject line.

Re: Find (ctrl-F) and replace (ctrl-H) not reognized

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:25:19 GMT

I'm just now realizing this is probably caused by the Find window displaying off screen (SAS Enterprise Guide).

If you suspect that you have a window that's "in focus" but off screen, use these keyboard shortcuts:

Alt+SPACE, then M, then use the arrow keys to move the window into view.

Practice a few times with your multiple displays to get the hang of it.

EG *should* detect that a window is out-of-view and move it into the primary display if needed, but it's possible that there is an instance or two where this isn't happening.