How to define and use panels.

[lchristensen]

I've used base SAS for decades on the mainframe, always in batch for adhoc reporting.

I'm trying to do something different for me. We have base SAS, SAS/AF, SAS/FS, SAS_Graph on a Windows-7 server.

I want to do something interactive. To prompt a user for information (specifically I'll be getting subsystem names and serial numbers) related to disk subsystems and then build commands for another tool to build my disk arrays.

What's new for me is panels in SAS. In z/OS I'd use ISPF dialog manager but that's not a reasonable option for this purpose.

The sample SAS provides just isn't making sense to me. 

Can anyone provide a really basic example of having base SAS (on Windows) display a panel and get data from it. Based on responses I'd then branch other code with other panels.

I suspect it will involve PMENU but not sure.

The attachment is a PowerPoint (PDF) that is a rough example of the first panel I'd build. In it anything preceded by an ampersand ("&") is a variable name. Line one of the prompt uses sample values for variables H1.NAME#, H2.NAME#, DR.NAME#, H1_SN_P# etc.

[ghosh]

If you have Enterprise Guide, look into creating menus using the prompt interface.

Otherwise there is the %window macro command, see below

https://www.lexjansen.com/wuss/2003/SASSolutions/c-using_window.pdf

[ballardw]

Old and limited but if you are providing a known list of values for selection you might look into the WINDOW (data step) or %WINDOW (macro) to capture values as well.

SAS/AF and FSP do take a lot of different work and may be overkill if you only need to collect a few strings.