Pro-tip: How to view the latest SAS documentation
It's amazing to me how much documentation SAS has about its products and more so how the Publications team is able to manage versions in today's world of stable and LTS cadence releases with CI/CD driving new iterations every month like clockwork. Sometimes when we look up the documentation for something, we want the doc for the exact same version of SAS that we're using, but other times we might prefer the latest doc that's available.
The documentation.sas.com web site UI provides a handy version selector on which we can point and click. But there's another technique you can use to navigate to the latest doc every time.
How it's normally done
So, let's say a colleague shared a link with you to the SAS/CONNECT for SAS Viya User’s Guide with this url: https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/v_030/viyaconnref/n0yupkav18yp19n1946o03d29o42.htm.
When you browse to the doc, you notice in the version selector that it's for 2022.1.4:
Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
To get the latest doc, you just need to select 2022.10 and you're set… for now. But what about next month? Or a year from now when you want the latest version again?
The pro-tip: hack the url
In the middle of the url shared with you there's a version number. For the SAS/CONNECT doc above, you'll see it as /v_030/. That's the version that corresponds to the 2022.1.4 release of that document. Different documents begin versioning at different points in time. For example, the SAS Viya Administration doc is at /v_031/ for 2022.1.4. But the cool part is that they all use that same /v_###/ approach.
To always get the latest version of the doc, replace /v_###/ with /default/.
That's it. And if you bookmark it with /default/ in there, then you'll always access the latest version of the document you're referencing. Take care, however, to note that a url with /default/ causes your browser to automatically redirect to the latest /v_###/ url. That means whenever you copy the url from the browser, you'll need to hack in the /default/ again if that's what you want.
Some other considerations
This technique will get you the latest version of a particular document… but it doesn't necessarily mean you're referencing the latest documentation for a product or feature. Over time, documents might be deprecated, combined with other documents, or completely new reference material might be introduced. One way to help guard against that problem is to scroll all the way to the bottom of the doc to find when it was last updated:
Coda
Having easy access to the latest documentation is a critical capability. And it's a great companion feature to the ability to pin the reference to a specific release as well. Share and enjoy!
I'd also like to especially thank my colleague @SimonMcGrother for his guidance with this post.
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
