Create an !EM_MESSAGE! email directive

ChrisNZ · ‎07-18-2018

When writing email text, it would be nice to be able to package the email text like the other parameters of the emails are packaged.

So instead of generating a warning (I have no control of the message contents) with:

%let msg= "<html><h1>P&L Summary</h1>" / "more text" ;
data _null_;
  file _EMAIL ;  
  put &msg. ;
  ...

I could wrap it like the other email parameters are wrapped:

data _null_;
  file _EMAIL ;
  LINE=symget(msg);
  put '!EM_MESSAGE! ' LINE ;
  ...

This last example would not generate a

WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference L not resolved.
message.

Just an idea...

Tom · ‎07-19-2018

I don't understand the proposal. What is the issue that it trying to fix? And how?

Is the issue just with trying to pass in data via a macro variable? If you want to pass data into your email then pass it as data and not as code fragments.

data _null_;
  file _email ;
  set input_data;
  put '!EM_MESSAGE! ' line ;
run;

Or are you saying that email directives don't work when you are generating HTML based messages instead of plain text messages? If so is it a problem for all email directives?

ChrisNZ · ‎07-19-2018

put '!EM_MESSAGE! ' line ;

is invalid.

There is no EM_MESSAGE directive. Hence the proposal that there be one.

russt_sas · ‎07-20-2018

You can get rid of the warning by changing the %LET to the following:

%let msg= '<html><h1>P&L Summary</h1>' / "more text" ;

The double quotes was causing the & to be seen as a macro trigger. Single quotes causes the & to be seen as just text.

ChrisNZ · ‎07-20-2018

I have no control of the message contents

russt_sas · ‎07-23-2018

If you are just worried about the warning, you can run with this OPTIONS statement so those types of warnings are not generated:

options noserror nomerror;

ChrisNZ · ‎07-23-2018

Thanks @russt_sas.

That's a good idea. However, turning off warnings is frowned upon/disallowed in most production environments these days.

(which makes it all the more urgent to categorise the log messages properly).

Quentin · ‎07-27-2018

If you're trying to mask problematic characters that result from resolving a macro variable, wouldn't %superq be part of the solution?

1    %let msg= "<html><h1>P&L Summary</h1>" / "more text" ;
WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference L not resolved.
2
3    data _null_ ;
4      line=symget('msg') ;
5      put line ;
6      put "%superq(msg)" ;
7    run ;

"<html><h1>P&L Summary</h1>" / "more text"
"<html><h1>P&L Summary</h1>" / "more text"

That said, +1 for EM_MESSAGE.

ChrisNZ · ‎07-27-2018

The / should be interpreted by put as code, i.e. generate new line.

Quentin · ‎07-27-2018

Yeah, I noticed that, that's why I said "part" of the solution. : )

I think that would be tricky, even with EM_MESSAGE. I think is EM_MESSAGE would have to look inside the value and see the / and interpret it, not the PUT statement. As showed with

line=symget('msg');
put line;

once you write a string value into a PDV variable, the PUT statement doesn't see slash or quotes in the string as special characters any more, they're just text. So I think EM_MESSAGE would need to know about quote marks and slashes and other stuff like that.

ChrisNZ · ‎07-27-2018

@Quentin Mmm I think you are right. My case makes no sense. Either the string is code and I have to suffer whatever message is generated, or it is a simple string and no code is run.

Oh well. There might still be value in the suggestion, but not from my example.