Creating a single program which will be dynamic and have all the changes happened in the past.

[hiteshchauhan1]

Hi,

I am a little confused right now about something i need to do but have no clue of how to do this. Posting it here to get ideas from SAS experts and to open a discussion about what i want to do.

So, a little bit of background of what was happening till now and later i will tell you what i want to do now.

Background: There is a sas program that changes every month, the changes that happen are not major just some additions or deletions from if statement. And due to the same reason we have to save that program with the Year and  month name at the end (YYMM). To keep track of what changed in which YYMM. 

What i want to do: I want to get rid of this and want a single program which can be run for those periods and will have changes according to the Year and month.

What are the ways to do this? I don't have much knowledge of all that SAS can do but i am interested in learning.

Initial Thought: I was thinking if i can create  table which will have logic based on YYMM date and i can call logics from that table to my program based on a macro variable which is basically the date(YYMM). But i am not sure if this can be done in sas or not. 

Let me know your ideas in the answer box.

Thanks,

[smantha]

a sample of what the business  logic looks like will be helpful. You might not need a table to write the logic unless you want to keep track of the changes.

[AhmedAl_Attar]

Why not using Source Code Version Control such as SVN, Git, Github?

This is not specific to SAS programs, and you can have all your team members, if you have any, accessing and using the same repository, without emailing files around, and keeping multiple copies on their disks.

Just a thought,

Hope this helps,

Ahmed

[Quentin]

As @AhmedAl_Attar  said, I think your real problem statement is:

---

Background: There is a sas program that changes every month, the changes that happen are not major just some additions or deletions from if statement. And due to the same reason we have to save that program with the Year and  month name at the end (YYMM). To keep track of what changed in which YYMM. 

This is what version control software is for.  You do not need to store a history of changes in your .sas file, and do not need to have a separately named .sas file for each year/month.  There is a learning curve to getting started with version control, but it could change your life. : )

Even if you want to be able to re-run the program from March, any version control software will pull an old version, any time you want.  You don't need to keep all the logic for every historic month in the same program.

[ed_sas_member]

Hi @hiteshchauhan1 

What come up to my mind is something like this:

- create a macro-program with Year, month as parameters, as well as things that changes in the program (ex. a value in an IF statement, etc.)

- create a dataset that contain one observation per couple Year - month + things that changes in the program in one or more variables

- use CALL EXECUTE or DOSUBL function to execute the macro-program based on the values of the dataset

Best,

[Kurt_Bremser]

You can do this with %if %then %do-%end blocks, since SAS 9.4 M6 (or M5) in open code:

%let yymm = 2006;

/* later in the code *

if
%if &yymm. = 2005 %then %do;
  sky = "blue"
%end;
%if &yymm. = 2006 %then %do;
  sky = "grey"
%end;
then put "This is how it works";

/* further code */

[ballardw]

Example of code.

Indicate what changes.

Indicate WHY it changes.