How to manually define legend colors in proc sgplot?

[Ani7]

I have a dataset (called data_customers) that is structured like this (with several more customers and companies) and I'm trying to make a scatter plot for each customer.

Date	Customer	Company	Value
1/1/2022	Customer A	Company A	2
1/2/2022	Customer A	Company A	3
1/3/2022	Customer A	Company A	6
1/4/2022	Customer A	Company B	3
1/5/2022	Customer A	Company C	5
1/6/2022	Customer A	Company C	1
1/7/2022	Customer A	Company C	3
1/8/2022	Customer A	Company D	6
1/1/2022	Customer B	Company D	4
1/2/2022	Customer B	Company D	6
1/3/2022	Customer B	Company D	4
1/4/2022	Customer B	Company D	2
1/5/2022	Customer B	Company D	5
1/6/2022	Customer B	Company D	6

Since there are a ton of customers that I need to create these plots for, I feed the SGPLOT procedure through a macro loop for each one so that each dot in the final scatter represents the date and value with the color of the dot representing the color of the company. However, in the above example, since the plot for Customer B only contains one customer, the color picked for Company D ends up being the same as the color picked for Company A in the plot for Customer A. Is there a way to manually assign colors to each value in the legend so that these colors end up being consistent across charts?

proc sql;
	select distinct  customer
	into 			:customers separated by "|"
	from 		data_customers;
	%let customer_count = &sqlobs.;
;quit;

%macro plot();
	%do i = 1 %to &customer_count.;
		%let current_customer = %scan(&customers., &i., "|");
		ods graphics on / noborder width=10in height=5in;
		proc sgplot data=data_customer (where=(customer = "&current_customer."));
			scatter x=date y=net_price / group=company filledoutlinedmarkers markerattrs=(symbol=circlefilled);
			title font = "Times New Roman" "&current_customer.";
			yaxis max=7 min=0 label="Value";
			xaxis display=(nolabel);
			keylegend / position=n title="" noborder;
		run;

	%end;
%mend plot;

%plot();

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you may want a DATTRMAP data set to link the company value to graph characteristics like color and marker type, especially if you want the same company to have the same characteristics in different plots.

It is best to look up the DATTRMAP in the documentation because it requires specifically named variables. You would add an Attrid=<name of the Id> to each plot statement that would use the attributes.

You are likely going about this a bit of hard way with the whole macro approach though.

Sort your data BY Customer (and possibly date if you ever may want Series plots). Then in SGPLOT add a BY Customer; you will get one plot per customer without having to deal with sql and macro approach.

By default the output will have a Customer=<the value> in the output. You can customize titles using the #BYVAL automatic variable and suppress the default by line by using the option NOBYLINE; before the plot.