An unusual error message from SAS?

[GeoSciGuy]

Hello.

First post here - no background whatsoever with SAS. My programming skills are 12 years since being exercised, so they are effectively nil. I am taking a grad-level applied stats class and the prof is requiring SAS output, which is giving me some mild concern, although I'm nothing if not persistant.

So here's my trouble: I've installed SAS Foundation onto my laptop (took three attempts before it loaded correctly). When I try to run my prof's "Chi-Squared Goodness of Fit" program (this runs just fine on his machine) I get an oddball error:

WARNING: No output destinations active.

ERROR: Unable to restore 'Base.Freq.OneWayFreqs' from template store!

NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors.

I'm attaching the program to this post.

So - is this some sort of option/setting problem, or an installation problem that wasn't detected by the installer?

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:

I'm not sure what the error message is about. The way to get rid of the "No output destinations active" message is to  put

ODS LISTING;

ODS PATH SASHELP.TMPLMST(read);

at the top of your program. I noticed that your professor had a DM command -- that was probably not necessary. I wonder whether your install really did work correctly. Usually the "Unable to restore" template message comes from a template item store not being found and after just installing SAS, your item store should definitely be there in SASHELP with all the templates used by FREQ and all the other procedures.

  So my guess is that you might lose the destination active message with the above code added to your program, but if you have a bad install, you may still get the ERROR message about the item store. And, if you do, then that's an indication that you should work with Tech Support.

  To open a track with Tech Support, submit the form at this link: http://support.sas.com/ctx/supportform/createForm

cynthia

[GeoSciGuy]

Submitted. I will report back here with a resolution for future readers who have a similar problem.

[Robert_Bardos]

Can reproduce the OnewayFreqs related error message on z/OS SAS 9.13 by running a simple PROC FREQ batch step with locale=german_germany (happens as well with french_france but not with danish_denmark interestingly. These LOCALEs are the three that I tested).

Additional information (at least in the way that I reproduce it) can be gained by running PROC TEMPLATE; SOURCE BASE.FREQ.ONEWAYFREQS; RUN;

A syntactically invalid LINK statement gets generated (in my case it displays as BaseÖFreqÖOneWayFreqs; in case this comes through unreadable there are capitalized O Umlauts between the name elements).

I can circumvent the problem by using PROC TEMPLATE ; SOURCE BASE.FREQ / FILE=BADLINK; then feeding file BADLINK through a data step, creating corrected link statements to file GOODLINK and feeding GOODLINK back like so

PROC TEMPLATE; %INCLUDE GOODLINK; RUN;  whereupon PROC FREQ runs with no problems.

Additional information: when using one of the NLS locales (german_germany in my case) the SAS log immeditaly issues a warning message first. Somewhat to the effect (am writing from memory) that the "session encoding OPEN_ED-1141 does not conform to SASHELP encoding" which is true since SASHELP's encoding is en_US and no localized versions of SASHELP have been installed. (Am yet to find an installation where this would be the case.)

Kind regards

Robert Bardos

Ansys AG Switzerland