Starting with SAS Viya version Stable 2024.05, PROC PRINT will now display an empty table in the Results window if the source data set has 0 rows. This is a change from previous versions going back to SAS 9. Prior to this change, running PROC PRINT from a data set with 0 rows sent no output to the Results window.
Some users generate "check" data sets in their code that create rows of data and display results only if something unexpected has happened. This recent change in SAS Viya 2024.05 now causes "false alarms" to go off in previously stable code, as results are now generated from empty data sets.
Although this new behavior can be avoided by adding extra code to check the number of rows in the data set prior to running PROC PRINT, end-users' code would be less impacted if an option was added to allow the user to decide if results should or should not be generated when the source data set has 0 rows. Please consider adding such an option. Thanks!
