newbie application development question

[Quentin]

Hi All, Despite having spent ~15 years writing SAS programs for myself, and SAS macros for myself and other SAS programmers, I have never done any real application development.  And I want that to change, so I'm looking for suggestions on where a complete newbie should start. Scenario: Say I'm a SAS programmer, working in a clinical trial group.  My job is to facilitate trial monitoring.  So every (day/week/month/whatever) I run a trial monitoring report (tables/figures/listings showing accrual, participant demographics, folllow-up rate, whatever), and save it (pdf) to a network drive where the trial team (statistician, project manager, regulatory, etc) can review it. Goal: Move from this system (where I am running these reports via a scheduled task or whatever), to developing an application, which will allow users to submit jobs to a SAS server that will generate canned reports, or their own custom reports, or live dashboards, or data extracts, or whatever.  All of the users are in-house, so I don't need to worry about folks connecting via internet, and related security. The users will not be programmers, so hoping to develop a simple user interface (could be just  a web page).  The users will not have SAS licenses. Limitations: I know SAS, and basic html, but not much more.  So while I'm excited to start learning something new, I'd appreciate a solution that will allow me to be at least minimally effective without spending months learning new language(s). It seems SAS has a number of different solutions for this sort of work (SAS/AF, SAS/INTRNET, Enterprise Guide, Microsoft Office add-on, etc.).  I'm imagining the general approach will be to take my parameterized macros (%AccrualTable, %DemographicTable etc.), and set them up as stored procedures so that a naive user can pass values via a pretty dialogue box, and view/export results in a reasonable format.  So was hoping folks might have suggestions on pros/cons of different approaches, or a favorite SGF paper that might provide an entry point for me. Kind Regards, --Quentin

[RMP]

Stored Processes are the way to go. They can be run on the web via the Stored Process application or run for all the SAS clients - Eguide, WRS, Addin Microsoft Office. Very flexible. SAS programming skills plus a basic knowledge of HTML is all you need. There are tons of SAS Global Forum papers and the SAS documentation is also very thorough.