Hi Krewe:
I am back from a few Regionals
where I awoke at 5 am one morning last week in TX,
and collected all my notes from the past year
and got working:
An Autoexec for SAS Enterprise Guide
which calls an autoexec for the site toolbox
that allocates filerefs and librefs
for the site library of utilities.
Later that morning the EG experts said:
"Well, yes, we have had some questions about whether this could be done."
programmers using EG are needed for testing.
contact me off-line for details
Ron Fehd "Start-Up Options" maven
http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2011/01/10/you-asked-for-it-the-autoexec-process-flow/
thank you!
my autoexec-egp is slightly different than what Chris described in his blog.
it does two actions
1. allocates both site and project file- and lib-refs
2. modifies option sasautos: adds both filerefs project and site-macro to the autocall search paths
3. %includes the project autoexec.
Notes:
1. case sensitive:
Chris reports SEG searches for initcaps: Autoexec
My routine is named lowcase autoexec-egp
and %includes the project lowcase autoexec.
2. folder names:
projects_root: e.g. C:\SAS-projects
the site utilities are in folder:
...\SAS-site\includes
...\SAS-site\macros
Another project may be named
...\Project-A
and has programs in a child folder
...\Project-A\sas
the project folder contains
...\Project-A\sas\autoexec-egp.sas
...\Project-A\sas\autoexec.sas
rationale: As a programmer I have many projects.
Key to this idea that a programmer may develop utilities
either parameterized %includes
or macros
and do both unit and integration tests of them in SAS,
i.e, separate from SEG.
Using autoexec-egp.sas allows SEG access to those site utilities.
I shall restate that:
Using autoexec-egp.sas allows SEG access to those site macros.
I am still waiting for technical reviews of this item in my book.
So: Stay Tuned
Ron Fehd Start-Up Options maven
The Autoexec process flow is not case-sensitive. "autoexec", "AUTOEXEC", "aUtoExec" flows will all trigger the Autoexec process flow in EG. I'm sorry if my blog post was misleading on that front.
We trigger on the name "autoexec" only because that's a convention that people are accustomed to -- there is nothing magically "autoexec-ish" that specifically ties it to traditional SAS AUTOEXEC.SAS processing. We could have called it "Run Me First", but decided to camp on a concept that people already used for a similar purpose.
A difference in Ron's approach is that it places the autoexec content in the context of the other "assets" (SAS programs) that are referenced already in the project. It's another way of working that might appeal to those who are accustomed to a very disciplined organization of SAS files, segmented by project (not talking EGP project file, but actual "work assignment" project).
Chris
thank you Chris for the note about case sensitive
One never knows when one might meet a Unix person for whom case sensitivity is an issue.
Ron
Ron,
If you are ever going to use Eguide and SAS on Unix .. You have mentioned that..
Think about all the small minor differences that can have nasty unexpected effects.
the companion manuals are covering a lot of those diferences, but not all.
The / and \ difference is an easy one everybody knows. The upcase/lowcase is a challenging one. I would advice to use lowercases.
- Windows (and SAS) don not care about the upcase/lowcase namings you can use that as you are convenient with
- Mainframe Oracle and some others are working wiht Uppercase, translating the lowercase to uppercase as needed,
- Unix Linux (all nix-based systems) are case-sensitive. Working with filenames you will already see some of that.
But including wiht a suffix like ".sas" not being specified bur generated convention,
And what to think of autocall macros. The autocall sas-macro source must be lowercase as upcases is not recognized in SAS in that special case.
That is one being faced synchronizing them in a highly controlled environment between all those different platforms.
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