keep the date each day

[tekish]

Dear expert,

I have a program which runs every day and I want to recorded the date.

 How do I keep the date without overwritten the previous date?

Here is the sample Output.

ID	Recorded date
000	01/12/2017
111	01/13/2017
222	01/13/2017
333	01/13/2017
444	01/13/2017
555	01/13/2017
666	01/14/2017
777	01/14/2017
888	01/14/2017
999	01/14/2017
112	01/15/2017
221	01/15/2017
113	01/15/2017

thanks,

[ballardw]

You need to provide more information. How are you storing/ selecting/setting the date currently? Some code describing your current process would help.

The most likely way I can think of destroying existing data is to reuse a data set name. Perhaps you need to APPEND todays data set to the previous data set?

[Astounding · Accepted solution]

Keep the date?  Where?  You can add a new variable each time the program runs, but that doesn't seem practical.  If you have only one variable to hold the date,  you can leave it alone or replace it.  If you only want to replace missing date values, you could code:

if recorded_date = . then recorded_date = today();

[tekish]

I want create a new variable as 

the first run

recorded_date = today();

second run as

recorded_date=today() + previous date();

thanks,

kesete

[Patrick]

You've already marked an answer as correct but now reading your consecutive post it looks like you're not there yet.

Assuming previous date() stands for the max. date already loaded in a previous run, a formula like today() + previous date() would return a date in the year 4034 which I assume is not what you want.

It's not clear to me what you're actually trying to achieve, but let's assume you have a master dataset where you collect daily increments.

If this is just about appending these daily increments then first add a date of today() to your incremental data - recorded_date=today(); - and then use Proc Append to append the new incremental data to your existing master data set.