DSGI will no longer be supported in SAS 9.3

[KimLeBouton]

Yesterday, I noticed the subject line in the following page, http://support.sas.com/kb/25/536.html.

Will there be any future cool tools that will convert DSGI to ODS? I've been following the ODS Report Writing Interface, but it isn't production yet either, http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/datastep/dsobject/index.html.

I have an old (circa '98), very detailed report that used DSGI, since pre-ODS didn't meet the needs at the time. Of course, there were hours of coding involved to create the two page report.

TIA,
Kim LeBouton
KJL Computing

[GraphGuy]

I don't use DSGI much, so I'm not an expert in this area ... but I grabbed a dsgi example out of the v6 SAS/Graph Examples book:

http://robslink.com/SAS/democd44/ex_30.htm

And tried running it in SAS 9.3 (it's not shipping to customers yet, but since I work at SAS I have access to the R&D version), and the dsgi example seems to run fine.  It displays the following note in the SAS log:

NOTE:  DSGI will no longer be supported after SAS version 9.3.

(the sas log says "after", whereas the text in the document you linked says "starting with" - I'll ask around and see if the document needs to be corrected.)

[ChrisNZ]

The document has been corrected, but no explanation is given.

Is this a move to have eveything in ODS? Is annotate to follow? Does legacy not matter to sas?

I find this information a bit disturbing tbh.

[Jay54]

SAS/GRAPH procedures and annotate will continue to be supported in SAS 9.3 and beyond.  There is no plan to discontinue these features.  While it will be clear to the reader that many new developments in graphics are happening in the ODS Graphics arena, we are also working on new graph procedures in the SAS/GRAPH product for SAS 9.4. 

[ChrisNZ]

That's good to know, Sanjay.

On the other hand, I reckon a year ago, the official line was that SAS/GRAPH procedures and DGSI will continue to be supported in SAS 9.2 and beyond.

Sas could display big fat warnings saying "DGSI is deprecated, please use new and shiny xxx".

Sas could also not enhance the ouputs created (Yay for anti-alisasing and transparency in 9.3!).

But stopping to support a part of the language that has been in production for years is not on. Legacy is a big deal for corporate tools and systems, and should be discarded only if absolutely necessary.

My opinion anyway.