Sandeep, Is the documentation for thee APIs on the Internet? John ... View more

Uh, I think you have misunderstood me. The newlines are part of the data. They should be in there. No reason to hate Microsoft here. PROC IMPORT is doing the wrong thing. The quoted string does not end, but the record does because of the newline. The quoted field carrys over to the next record in the file. When I open the CSV in Microsoft it opens properly. Here is an example of the CSV file Name, Address "Bob", "123 Sycamore Ln" "Fred", "200 Main St Apt 200" Notice that the second address contains a line break. PROC IMPORT chokes on this. As for the solution from Mike, I realize that I can do what you describe to open and save, however, this presents another problem. MS Excel assumes that the CSV is ASCII data which it isn't. It is a UTF-8 file. So opening CSV and saving to XLS causes transcoding of characters such as the registered trademark symbol. Ouch. ... View more

I think one of the challenges right off with setting up stored processes in a Pharma company would be the fact that Stored Processes are difficult to write and register if your preferred SAS tool is good ole SAS DMS. And my experience is that SAS programmers in Pharma prefer the more traditional SAS interface. Stored Process creation and registration is much easier in Enterprise Guide then other means (I guess you could call it manual registration). Getting the typical Pharma SAS programming team to convert to using Enterprise Guide is a definite challenge. Most SAS programmers at Pharma companies are writing lots of macro, data step, and proc report code. They are heavily invested in massive macro libraries that they have developed in house to customize every last option on gplot or proc glm output. They know the syntax for the procs that they use. You show them Enterprise Guide and they simply don't see anything there that interests them. Personally, I like Enterprise Guide a lot. But then I am not spending 40 hours a week writing proc report code to prove that the next new drug is safe and effective. Now, if we expand health from just a Pharma discussion to medical customers and maybe health insurance provides -- then I see some real nice traction for Enterprise Guide and Stored Processes. It is a very natural fit for those types of users. Insurance providers have massive claims databases and they have very few people that know how to accurately and efficiently report on these massive data. I could definitely see a group inside of one of these organizations using Enterprise Guide to author a series of Stored Processes and expose them to a larger audience within the organization to run them and view the results. Just my two cents, John ... View more

The makeup of DEFINE.XML is described in a PDF document on the CDISC web site. It wasn't too hard to understand. From Mike's post it seems like XML is quite unknown to him. I can tell you that XML is the easy part. Knowing your specific standard is where the complexity comes in. XML is just a way to mark up data. You surround it with tags that you make up. Like this. John Leveille d-Wise Technologies, Inc. So, since XML is markup using any tag names you like -- how can it be useful? Well, it becomes useful when someone makes a standard that we all try to use. That is precisely what CDISC is doing for the Pharma community. So, there is this standard that CDISC has come up with called SDTM - Study Data Tabulation Model. The grand idea is that if we all put our study data into SDTM XML formatted files, then we can have a file called DEFINE.XML that basically provides a manifest of all the tables in columns in the study -- then we should be able to exchange data between lots of different companies and software systems. The reality is far from this utopic vision, but that is where the CDISC organization wants to help us go. I think Mike points out an interesting fact. Smaller organizations don't have the inertia of big pharma. So many times they just decide that it is both easiest and cheapest to come up with the most expeditious, albeit proprietary, data transfer mechanism. It is within the larger Pharma where the motivation is higher to embrace the standard in an effort to save money and rework. ... View more

Yes, what you want to do is quite simple, but the technique is operating system dependent, as Cynthia pointed out. I don't think you are using VSE (heh!) so I am going to assume that you are running on Windows XP. Just write your SAS code in a text file and save as foo.sas. Then run it one time from a windows command prompt. Start -> Run -> cmd.exe > "C:\Program Files\sas\SAS 9.1\sas.exe" c:\projects\stuff\foo.sas You can tweak this further by naming the sas log file and output with additional command line options. But this is the basic gist. And make sure that the SAS program is the first argument after the SAS executable. Options should follow. There are other incantations, but this way works. Now go to the Windows control panel and schedule it. Double click on "Scheduled Tasks" then double click "Add a Scheduled Task" and follow the nifty dialogs. Select the sas.exe executable as the application that you want to schedule. When you get to the final dialog in the scheduler check the box that says "open advanced properties...". On the advanced dialog you can edit the "Run:" box to insert the path to your SAS file and any other parameters that you want. Remember to insert your SAS program just after sas.exe. There will probably be a -CONFIG option on the command line - just leave it. Change the "Start in" folder to match the folder where your SAS program resides. This will get your SAS log to come out along side the program. Finally, when you save the advanced dialog it will create a schedule task icon that just says "sas". You probably want to right click and rename the task to something more specific like "My Foo Program". This works well, but you may get annoyed by the SAS splash screen that comes up when the program runs and you are logged on to the machine. Simply double click the scheduled task, edit the SAS command and tack on the -nosplash option to supress the splash screen. Good luck, John ... View more