Open Source SAS Macros, Scripts & related tools for daily business

[KatjaGlass]

Hi all,

I am searching for open source SAS macros, scripts and related tools used for daily business. I have created an Open Source Portal for Clinical Study evaluations, where I included already those which I am aware of (https://www.glacon.eu/portal - overview & info pane contains links). 

The sassoftware githubs does not really contain daily business examples, but more general learning and environment things. The SAS blogs (visualization) is nice and contains often code, but unluckily not on github and the open source license of the blog is also not provided (or is it somewhere hidden)? The "Free Data Friday" tag in this community contains nice examples which are more practical (also no license mentioned). Somehow this is all hard to find. 

If you know any further collections, could you please link them?

Thanks and best regards,

Katja

[joeFurbee]

Hi @KatjaGlass,

I agree you have to do a certain amount of detective work to find specifics. Hopefully, some of the resources I list below will help.

github.com/sassoftware and blogs.sas.com are great places to start when looking for open source coding examples. You may also want to browse through developer.sas.com. There you'll find a wealth of information and links to other resources. 

Depending on what you are looking for, here are some 'examples' repositories on github containing sample code and examples. Also, I did a general GitHub search for 'sas macros' and found the macrocore repository from @AllanBowe. The search also uncovered other repos from users outside of sassoftware.

Here are blog posts with the 'Developers' tag. And here are ones marked with 'open source'. You can search on other groupings (Python, R, cloud, etc.) on the blogs page. Not every post will fit your needs, but a more detective work will uncover relevant material.

Other resources you may find interesting are the Webinars series. You can experience the Webinars live or on-demand. Many of the Webinars provide links to materials covered during the session. 

Another great resource for code is the SAS Global Forum proceedings from past years.

And last, but not least, the Communities! Any number of searches here will turn up nuggets of code and wisdom.

As for licensing, each resource is different. Some expect you to have a SAS license. While others may offer links to various SAS free trial software. Other no-cost options include SAS Viya for Learners and SAS University edition.

I hope this helps,

Joe

[AllanBowe]

Thanks for calling out the macrocore library!  We recently switched to automatic semantic versioning with every release, so you can be sure of the version you are linking to. 

The macros are geared towards application developers, with tools for creating folders, web services (SAS 9 STPs or Viya JES), libraries, you name it. They are tested heavily in our commercial tool (Data Controller) and a part of the SASjs framework.  The documentation is created using DoxyGen and hosted here:  https://core.sasjs.io.

To make the macrocore library even easier to consume we even made a CLI tool for it.  This is brand new and yet to be documented, but the steps are this (note - you will need to install NPM and GIT as described here).

# install the tool globally to add sasjs to your PATH
npm i -g sasjs-cli

# create a new project for your app
sasjs create myFantasticApp
cd myFantasticApp

# a sample folder structure with sample files is now available
# your final programs go inside the services folder
# your macros go in the macros folder
# the header of each SAS file contains the list of dependencies
# dependencies are sourced first from the macros folder then macrocore

# the next step will compile your services 
# this means you will have a SINGLE FILE PER SERVICE with all dependent macros
# it will also create a deployment script to register them as web services 

sasjs build

The great thing about this approach is that there is no dependency on the filesystem (as all your dependencies are in the actual service) and the build process will even strip out the comments to reduce filesize.  By forcing dependencies to be in the header you are also ensuring the accuracy of the automated documentation.

It's all fully MIT open source and free to use.   Join my talk at virtual SASGF to learn more!

[Quentin]

If you're interested in clinical trial reporting macros, Roland Rashleigh-Berry (RIP) created an extensive macro library for this purpose, and shared it with the SAS community.  Happily, it is still available at: http://www.datasavantconsulting.com/roland/.

Whether or not you use the full library, it's a really nice example of how one expert macro developer approached this challenge.

Beyond that, I agree with Joe's suggestions of places to search.  There are a LOT of people who post macros to various parts of the web... 

My guess is, most people end up maintaining their own personal (or corporate) macro libraries, rather than actually using a complete library provided by someone else.  But it's still very helpful to review how others are addressing common needs.

[KatjaGlass]

Hi all,

thanks for your suggestions. The tools you mention are already on my list. The question is whether there are additional ones. Sometimes people publish really code code snippets, but these are not used, because no one finds them. Maybe someone is aware of another nice collection.

Currently I have the following for SAS:

- FDA Jumpstart Scripts

- SASUnit

- Spectre (Roland's SAS® Macros) (Roland Rashleigh-Berry)

- SAS Macros by Scott Bass

- SAS Macros by Macro People (Allen Bowe)

- RhoInc Plots

- PhUSE Scripts & Macros

Thanks,

Katja

[Quentin · Accepted solution]

Please post your list when your done (with URLS).

I'm a big fan of Richard DeVenezia's macros ,especially %seplist.  https://www.devenezia.com/downloads/sas/macros/

Chris Swenson has a lot of good stuff at http://sas.cswenson.com/

Sorry to see Frank DiIorio's site seems to be gone!  (it was http://www.codecraftersinc.com/).

@Reeza shares a lot in https://gist.github.com/statgeek/

Mayo Clinic shares at http://bioinformaticstools.mayo.edu/?category=20

[KatjaGlass]

Hi Quentin,

thanks for your list! I have included the macros from Chris as well. Richard unluckily does not use any license, so I have not yet included it. I tried to contact him, but was not successful so far.

As requested, please find my list which you also find the the open source portal (https://www.glacon.eu/portal/). The following list contains only things related to SAS. On the portal you find also other tools and scripts. 

FDA Jumpstart Scripts https://github.com/phuse-org/phuse-scripts/tree/master/tested/SAS
SASUnit https://sourceforge.net/p/sasunit/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/
Spectre (Roland's SAS® Macros) http://www.datasavantconsulting.com/roland/Spectre/download.html
SAS Macros by Scott Bass https://github.com/scottbass/SAS/tree/master/Macro
SAS Macros by Macro People https://github.com/macropeople/macrocore
Reindeer - Result Render Tool https://github.com/KatjaGlassConsulting/reindeer
PhUSE White Paper Central Tendencies Scripts https://github.com/phuse-org/phuse-scripts/tree/master/whitepapers/WPCT
Chris's SAS Macros http://sas.cswenson.com/downloads/macros
Data Visualization - SAS Blog
RhoInc Plots https://github.com/RhoInc?language=sas
Going Translational with Linked Data https://github.com/phuse-org/CTDasRDF
PhUSE White Paper Utilities https://github.com/phuse-org/phuse-scripts/tree/master/whitepapers/utilities
PhUSE Contributed Scripts & Macros https://github.com/phuse-org/phuse-scripts