Using Sas/Fsp® Software for Ad Hoc Reporting

Posters

Paper 249

Using SAS/FSP® Software for Ad hoc Reporting

By Marc Schlessel SPS Software Services Inc.

Abstract

This paper is geared towards mainframe SAS® programmers who are looking for an easy solution of creating ad hoc reports from user input without the interaction from a SAS® programmer. The SAS/FSP® product is a great tool to use for these types of projects. A user could input some selection criteria into a screen, and receive a report based on the criteria entered. This can be done interactively or in batch mode. This paper will address creating these reports in batch mode, but the same code and concept can be applied interactively.

Introduction

I run into users all the time that request reports they would like to submit themselves, whenever they want, with a different set of selection criteria. By using SAS/FSP® software, this can be accomplished with little effort. If your user doesn’t ask for this type of request, it’s always a good idea to keep this idea in the back of your mind, especially if your user is constantly calling you asking you to run a particular report using different selection criteria. You may want to take a little extra time and develop a system where you would turn it over to the user and eliminate phone calls. Another plus to using SAS/FSP® to accomplish this task is that with clists you can create it so the user never sees the SAS® code. It’s always a good idea not to let the user see any code. This will eliminate possible problems in the future. Another option to accomplish the task of users running their own reports and changing the selection criteria within the report is to use %let’s at the top of the code. This however is not as user friendly as using SAS/FSP® software, plus the user would have access to the SAS® code, which potentially can cause problems down the road. This paper does not address the %let option.

Information needed from the User

Before starting, information from the user would need to...