Getting ODS status information programmatically

[MikeRhoads]

One question that has come up periodically on SAS-L (e.g. Paul Walker posting of Jan 10 2006) is how a program can (or could in the future if there are enhancements) get information about the status of ODS. Paul specifically wanted to be able to find out in a macro whether the LISTING destination was open or closed, so that he could restore it to its previous state at the end of his macro. Certainly there are other items of information that would be useful to have.

[David_SAS]

Mike,

That question will be directly addressed at SUGI. That's a definite interest of ours in Base/ODS R&D.

-- David Kelley, SAS

[JackHamilton]

I'm also interested in this. I remember having a discussion about it at a GeekFest with one of the developers, and it's pretty hard to do - there might be many output destinations open, each with different settings, including tagsets with loads of user variables.

ODS is really an amazing system. If you've looked at how other programs create multiple forms of output, SAS really stands out in its ease of use (yeah, tagsets are hard, but no harder than XML formatting).