i am looking for a quick way to represent the various data sets in my SAS program as database symbols,
connect them with diamond shapes to represent decision points and finally a shape for a data table or REPORT - just as you would depict a flow chart
of the logic contained in a computer program that involves ETL and Analytics.
I know EG has a PROCESS FLOW option we can select under VIEW -- but maybe there is another graphic package that is available with VA?
and YES and a user pointed out in 2010 --- SAS/OR and NETGRAPH can accomplish a flow chart looking visual -- but that is overly complicated for my current task....
Unfortunately SAS Visual Analytics out of the box doesn’t have the ability to create flowchart like visuals and save them as PDF’s. Though I believe you can probably do this with SAS/Graph using the annotate functionality and then either call the code via a Stored Process and print to PDF in SAS Visual Analytics, or use ODS PDF wrapping your annotate code to create the PDF.
I have cross posted this in the SAS/Graph community to see if they have more ideas for you.
If creating these with SAS/OR and Netgraph is overly complicated, creating them (using custom annotate code, etc) in SAS/Graph probably would be overly complicated too I do not know of an easy way to create such diagrams in SAS/Graph.
If you are willing to draw the flow chart in Word (RTF), and then use SAS to update it with names of datasets, counts of records, etc. I like this approach from Art Carpenter.
www.wuss.org/proceedings11/Papers_Carpenter_A_74920.pdf
But that's not really what you were looking for...
You could probably do this with custom markers in a scatter plot on top of a dendrogram perhaps (assuming you need branching) or a series plot (if you don't need branching), but I second Rob's opinion - it's probably more complicated than you'd want. Would be nice if we had a "Flowchart" graph type
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