Execute an egp file via sas program

[colonel4]

Hi,

Is there a sas command to call an egp file from a sas program? I tried %include but it returned an error.

[SASKiwi]

No. EGPs need to be run from Enterprise Guide, not in a separate SAS session even if it is started from EG. EGPs can be called from VB or Powershell scripts as these set up the required EG environment to run in. 

[Kurt_Bremser]

Just for the technical background: a .egp file is a zip archive of XML files which describe the contents of the project.

%INCLUDE expects pure text, so you can't use it for .egp files.

If the project contains nothing that needs EG's special capabilities (file transfer, local interaction with MS Office and other such stuff), then you can export the whole project as code, transfer that to the server (if you use one), and use %INCLUDE there.

[colonel4]

Thank you @Kurt_Bremser. I was hoping to import an external excel file on SAS EG by creating an egp project. My objective was calling it it from a code so I don't have to upload the file manually each time. I saw in one of your previous posts that it was possible by Data>Copy files. I created two steps by adding copy files and a proc import in the project. But seemingly there is no way to automate the file importing process.

[Quentin]

While I use EG (happily), I avoid using the non-code features.  In this case if you need to upload an Excel file to the server before reading it, I would look for other options for automating the file upload.  For example, our SAS server is running on linux.  We have used SMB to let us easily push files from windows to the server.    And we can schedule a job on Windows to push files.  We've also sometimes mounted windows shares to linux so that we can have SAS jobs running on the server that pull files stored on Windows.  So we can schedule a job on linux to pull files and then batch submit a SAS job.  Or the SAS program itself can pull the files, or read the files in place.  

If you rely on EG non-code features, then you're relying on EG to run the programs, and you need to look into ways to automating calls to EG (see Chris Hemedinger's papers/blogs/etc.)  If you use pure SAS code, then your code can run as a batch job, or in EG, or as a stored process, or whatever.  And it can always be supplemented with some OS scripting if needed.

[AlanC]

Not every aspect of non-code EG can be automated via code. Normally, you automate tasks using C# and the EG .NET libraries. However, this seems like overkill here. You can automate every aspect of EG using an RPA technology. For example, Power Automate is built into Windows (free) and can replicate everything you do in EG.

Simplest solution: write a SAS program, as Quentin mentioned, and automate that. If you want a new super skill, look at RPA.