SAS Macro Governance

[osmelbrito]

Hi everyone

One problem we are facing with SAS is the governance of macros (programs and variables) that we were building lately. 

We have a lot of macros and we want to inform our sas users their existence and push them to use it.  Any thoughts about it?

[SASKiwi]

Set your macros up in AUTOCALL libraries then add a SASAUTOS option in your SAS server's AUTOEXEC to point to these automatically for all SAS sessions:

libname OURAUTOS "OurAUTOCALLMacroLibraryFolder";
options sasautos = (OURAUTOS, SASAUTOS);

Putting your macro library first will ensure your resolve before the SAS ones.

Documenting them on a web page so it is easy for SAS users to find is worth considering.

[Quentin]

Agree with the autocall route and documenting the macros on a web page.

I wrote a paper a long time ago about automating generation of an html index of a macro library by having a standardized code header in each .sas file, and then using SAS to read in the headers and parse them and write a report via ODS HTML.  https://www.lexjansen.com/nesug/nesug04/po/po04.pdf

But I think rather than roll your own, you might look into something like Doxygen https://www.doxygen.nl/index.html for building documentation from code.  I think that is what @AllanBowe uses to build documentation for his macro library.  If you open any of the .sas files in https://github.com/sasjs/core/tree/main/base.  You can see the @ tags for the data in the header.

[ChrisNZ]

I also find that having a help call for macros where   %macroname(help)  works for all macros,and prints a help page helps.

You could also write a %macrolist  macro that lists the available macros and a short description.

Finally, having sensible and coherent names helps too. 

[ballardw]

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@ChrisNZ wrote:

I also find that having a help call for macros where   %macroname(help)  works for all macros,and prints a help page helps.

You could also write a %macrolist  macro that lists the available macros and a short description.

Finally, having sensible and coherent names helps too. 

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There are examples of one way of accomplishing this in the SAS supplied %SGANNO macro (and the %annomac if SAS Graph is available)