Publishing output help needed

[beverlyw]

I am a new user to SAS and Enterprise guide and am currently doing the online training (programming essentials) but I have some report requests that need to be available to non-sas users. We had someone develop a few of these but I cannot tell how they created the interface for the user. The ones they did have prompts (and mine will too, mostly date prompts) and the interface is an html page that calls a stored procedure. Can anyone walk me through an overview of how this is done? I am new to SAS but have progamming background so I think if I know the general idea I can get the rest! (I hope)
Any help would be most appreciated!!!

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
There's a difference between a "stored procedure" -- such as the stored procedure you could have and execute using a query with a DBMS (such as DB2 or Oracle or SYBASE) and a SAS "stored process" such as a stored .SAS program, that can be executed from many different client applications in the BI Platform (or SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform).

A SAS stored process can be executed, for example, from within SAS Enterprise Guide, from the SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), from Web Report Studio, from the Information Delivery Portal or, from within a custom application or HTML page that uses the Stored Process Web Application (SPWA).

You say that the interface is an HTML page that calls your code. Generally speaking, people use the default stored process interface that's built into how stored process work. In this interface, parameters that are defined in the metadata are automatically used to generate prompts in the prompting interface.

An alternative method by which SAS programs can be executed using an HTML interface is through the use of SAS/IntrNet.

So, the answer to your question will depend on whether you are using SAS Stored Processes and the BI Platform or whether you are using SAS Application Server Programs and SAS/IntrNet. One way to tell is to look inside the HTML file that calls the stored process and look for the FORM Action -- this will generally be a URL that calls the managing program.

If you are using the BI Platform and SAS Stored Processes, you should see a call to: SASStoredProcess?do in the URL that instructs the server what program to submit.

If you are using SAS/IntrNet, then you should see a call to broker.exe in the HTML page or you will have a file with an extension of .hsql if it is an htmSQL server call.

For more information about using SAS Stored Processes and how to convert an existing .SAS program to be a stored process, refer to this paper:
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/024-2008.pdf
or search for other user written papers about SAS Stored Processes. The documentation on Stored Processes is here:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/stpug/61271/HTML/default/a003152553.htm

cynthia