Enterprise Guide - SAS Studio interoperability

[DBain]

Has anyone figured out a way to read an Enterprise Guide project file into SAS Studio or vice versa?

The new visual designer view in SAS Studio is a great addition and would suit the needs of a good deal of our analysts without having to try and roll out new desktop applications, which is a considerable chore in out currently desktop infrastructure.

The majority of our existing work is in EG though and I don't want to have to recreate these projects manually or have to try and merge code if the two installed bases need to work together.

[CaseySmith]

While you can open the same external content (ex. programs, etc.) in either, moving projects between Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio (without manually recreating) is not currently supported.  We recognize the value this capability would provide and are exploring adding it in a future release.

[AmyP_sas]

To add a bit to CaseyS' answer, we are looking to add this to SAS Studio and I'd love to get feedback on what we're thinking.  There's not a good way to do a complete conversion from an EG project all the way to a Studio process flow (.CPF file).  What we can do is scrape the SAS code out of the EG project and bring that into Studio as something like a .SAS file.  This is somewhat like the experimental functionality we have in Studio to bring in a stored process - when you pull a stored process into Studio, it creates a Studio task to be able to run it.  So it's not really a conversion, more a way for you to still use your existing things in the Studio interface.

[DBain]

Thanks both,

The ability to read the code straight from EG fies into Studio would save time and allow us to resuse our existing assets more effectively. Very much in the same way that we imported code into program nodes in EG when we migrated our processes from Base SAS.

[AmyP_sas]

We now have an experimental feature in SAS Studio to read EG projects - see this community post for the details.

[SIgnificatif]

What do you think guys about the online version of EG ? it will be good enough ? or the windows version of EG will still be the most stable version and the best solution to write sas code ?

Thank you for your response.

[CaseySmith]

Both EG (Windows client) and SAS Studio (web client) are very capable SAS programming environments.  It is largely personal preference.  You can view current differences between the two here:

http://support.sas.com/software/products/sas-studio/faq/SASStudio_vsEG.htm

EG and Studio are going to continue coming together, so that you can work more seamlessly on content between the two.  Eventually they will be two clients of the same application (one native, one web) -- intentionally not identical, but will leverage the strengths of their respective environments (native vs web), and users will be very comfortable working on the same content from either, seamlessly.

Casey

[TomKari]

My guess is that the "fat client" desktop version of EG will always have more capabilities, simply because writing to a desktop development environment like Windows will probably always offer richer capabilities than a zero-footprint web-based environment.

In terms of is it "good enough"? As always, that depends on what you want to use it for! I think this will be a fascinating evolution over the coming months and years, and I can't wait to use all of these facilities, and figure out for myself the strengths and weaknesses of each. There should be some great community conversations around this coming up!

Tom

[AmyP_sas]

Great timing!  We just did a SAS Global Forum paper on this very topic & I've posted an article about it.  See https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/SAS-Studio-vs-SAS-Enterprise-Guide-Choosing-t... and let us know what you think.

[SIgnificatif]

Thank you for the response.

nice article, it covers main points on the subject.

Sincerely.