INTGET Function - Can anyone suggest a practical use for this function ?

[DaveShea]

Hi,

Whilst casually strolling through the SAS Help Centre today looking for something completely unrelated, I came across the INTGET function. Being a big fan of the INTNX function I thought I would take a look at this INTGET function as it might be useful.

The documentation is at:
http://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=n0jlf76lzb3kqun17sg20vkvvt8j.htm&...

Well, now I've read the documentation and seen the examples and even created a few examples myself. The function works just as planned.

My question is: Can anyone suggest a real-life situation that this function might be used in ? I know what the function does, I just cannot yet think of situations when I might use it.

I do not doubt that someone, somewhere in the world of SAS users uses this function, but I would really like to have some good example reasons of what business purposes they resolve by using the function.

Any thoughts ?

I am using SAS 9.04.01M4 under Windows 7 Professional.

Cheers,

Downunder Dave.

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

I suspect the main users might be those dealing with time series data and wanting to determine the appropriate settings for some of the ETS modeling procedures. From my limited use of those procedures if you model with a "daily" data interval and the data is actually once per week you get errors or funny results.

A more obscure use would be if you are creating multiple rows from some parameters such as

do startdate to endate;

   output;

end;

You might want to set a conditional interval based on the result of INTGET. You will find a moderate number of questions on this forum about expanding datasets with similar code but no INTGET portion.

Kudos for being the first person to ask about INTGET on this forum. At least I didn't get any hits when I looked to see if someone had a specific need/use for the function.

[SASKiwi]

I too have never used this function so thanks for pointing it out @DaveShea. Since it produces the same date and time intervals as can be used in INTNX I'm wondering if it might be useful for examining a series of dates or time then using the intervals from INTGET in INTNX.