Roland's SAS® Macros

[This site is not connected with the SAS Institute]

(Author: Roland Rashleigh-Berry                                                                                              Date: 21 Aug 2008)
Latest updates ---- Macro download ---- My CV ---- MySongs

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newsletters

To keep you up to date with news about this web site, I will issue a newsletter from time to time. I will probably issue one about every three months but sometimes it will be more frequent, other times less. It all depends on how many changes I make. You can link to all the current and past newsletters below. They are in MS Word format so that they are suitable for printing. If you don't have MS Word (I don't) then there is always OpenOffice software you can download for free which will read and print these documents.

September 2007 Newsletter
January 2008 Newsletter
April 2008 Newsletter

sasautos extensions

Old-time SAS programmers will be familiar with the macros %left and %trim. These have been supplied with the sasautos library distributed with copies of SAS for many years. They behave like macro functions and yet they are macros. They have now been made redundant, because %sysfunc calls can replace them, but %left and %trim have been used by programmers for years not knowing or caring whether they are macro language functions or macros. You use them in the same way. There is no rationale as to why some of these macros are there and some not. You might be familiar with the %words macro that you can find on the SAS Technical Support site. That has never been a member of the supplied sasautos library and yet it is obviously a useful macro to have there. The point is, it is up to you to decide what utility macros you want to make available and to create them if you need them.

Obvious candidates for adding to the sasautos library are the very useful function calls used in SCL for extracting variable and data set information. In SCL you need to open the data set and give it a file handle before you can get this information but it is easy enough to write this code into a macro in a way that the whole macro behaves like a macro function. I have used this technique for many of the sasautos extension macros. This is not at all efficient when you are making many of these calls, because the data sets are being opened and closed multiple times when once would have been better, but when you are developing more complex macros, such as I have done for some clinical reporting macros, then the convenience outweighs the efficiency considerations.

Since 1987 I have been building up my collection of low-level, general-purpose utility macros. Every time I have spotted the need for one, I have written one. I have asked many other people to tell me what macros would be useful and created them if I could see a need. The result is that my collection of macros is very comprehensive and the number of them stands at over 150. If you ever think of a macro, the chances are that it is already in my macro collection. I would put that probability at higher than 95% so my collection is a very good place to start looking if you are thinking you need a macro to do something general-purpose and low-level, especially in the field of clinical reporting. To see these macros in alphabetical order plus their searchable descriptions then use the link below.

Alphabetical list of macros plus their descriptions.

All the macros can be downloaded as a zip file from the page you can link to below.

download

Are these macros "open source"?

From time to time I get asked why I don't distribute my macros under an "open source" license. This sounds like a good idea except that the idea of "open source" encourages software to be improved upon. Again, this sounds like a good idea but the trouble with my macros is that they are tightly bound to each other. The more complex macros rely on lower level macros and if these macros change then the more complex macros might encounter errors or it might change their functionality. This has to be avoided so my macros are not in the spirit of being "open source". Any changes to them are only safely made by me, since I know their dependencies. So instead of "open source" you should regard the code as educational that shows you how macros can work together. But as for using these macros -- you are free to use them as if they were open source. Use them freely but don't amend them.

Are there bugs in these macros?

Almost certainly. All complex software has bugs in it no matter who tells you otherwise. And if not bugs, changes are required, sometimes, for the software to be more useful or understandable. You will see from the "Bugs and changes log" page below that there have been many bug fixes and changes made to these macros. More bugs will be found in the future and more changes made. I don't feel I am a bad programmer because of this. It is normal for this sort of thing. For those who used to work on IBM mainframes, even the program IEFBR14 had bugs in it or at least had to be amended more than once to get it to work properly. And what did IEFBR14 do, you might wonder? I will tell you -- it did nothing. It was a null program that would instantly return control to the calling program by using the instruction "BR 14" which means "Branch to the content of register 14" so the only instruction it originally contained was one to exit the program. Even that went wrong so don't expect my macros to be entirely bug free as, collectively, they are about a million times more complicated. Because of this, if you intend to use these macros in a production environment, then it is only wise to do so if they are covered by some sort of support contract.

IEFBR14

Having said that, it is very rare I have found a bug in one of the simple low-level macros. The bugs are nearly always in the complex reporting macros but I am giving no promises. To give you an idea of how reliable the macros are, please read the "Bugs and changes log" that you can link to in the "Spectre (Clinical)" section near the end where you can see what work I have done on these macros over the past two years or more.

How to use the macros

All the macros you can download here are intended to be put in a library and included on the sasautos path. The major macros often call lower-level macros so these will only work correctly if all these macros are made available and declared to the sasautos path. I sometimes get asked by email why the major macros don't work and why it is complicated by them calling other macros but this is the whole point of this web site and the approach it takes. It is all to do with the "sasautos extensions" idea that I advocate and by that I mean building your own library full of all the utility macros you will ever need and putting them on the sasautos path. If you do this right then all the macros will work correctly and you should be far more productive in your work.

What's BAD about these macros?

Something most people don't like about these macros is that they are very tightly linked. You call one macro and it might call others which in turn call others which in turn might call others. You call one macro and you might end up calling twenty or so. Most programmers are not used to this. It's "bad" but it has to be that way. I use many of the smaller macros in many places and to avoid duplicating the code I have to keep them as lots of separate macros so that I can maintain them. And I use the sasautos approach in that all the macros I need are in one library and this library gets declared to the sasautos= system option. In other words, it is a second autocall library. You got one of these autocall libraries from the SAS Institute with your copy of SAS and now I am giving you a second library which you are supposed to put on the sasautos path in front of SASAUTOS. If you are working on your own PC or in your own work area then this is easy enough. The trouble comes when you use my macros to create a solution that other people are supposed to use. You then have to install my sasautos library somewhere centrally where all the users can access them. Here it gets more difficult as most sites will not want to see all these macros appear - especially in their production area and especially because none of my macros have been formally validated. However, what might be acceptable, is a minimum set of these macros that are needed to implement a needed solution. How to identify a minimum set of macros and copy just those macros across to a library is explained on the page you can link to below.

Copying a minimum set of macros to a library

SAS software tips and techniques

As I think of them, I will be adding my own sas tips and techniques to this site. You can get to them by clicking on the link below.

SAS software tips and techniques.

Roland's Graphical Patient Profiler

My latest project, now nearly complete, is a graphical patient profiler, very much like the one written by Ya Huang and described in the following article.
A Low Cost Graphical Patient Profiler with SAS MetaViewApplet

The patient profiler described in the article is similar in parts to the PPD Patient Profiles.
PPD Patient Profiles

I have written an entirely independent version of a graphical patient profiler, inspired by Ya Huang's creation, which I thought was a brilliant design achievement. I have put a lot of man-hours of my free time into this as I consider it to be a very important enhancement to the clinical trials process. Clinicians, who follow the progress of clinical trials, will know about the serious adverse events and the successes. They will probably find this out via telephone calls or faxes because the data from the clinical trial will be "unclean". Indeed, I have had access to this unclean data from many clinical trials and it is truly unclean, even with wrong years for events. It takes months to sort out the irregularities. But there is a lot of useful data in there that could be used for the benefit of patient safety. If the clinician had access to the data and could visualise the situation, they could, perhaps, spot danger-signals for patients on the trial, based on the profile of patients who have already withdrawn from the trial or patients who had suffered drug-related adverse events. If the data were clean enough to use, and the patient profiling software were good enough and flexible enough, then perhaps potential problems could be spotted in advance, much to the benefit of patient safety.

For these reasons stated, it is with much pride and pleasure that I have released my graphical patient profiler such that all can use it for free. It is now released as a compiled and stored macro that you can download from this web site. You can link to the patient profiler page below. Feel free to use it and if you encounter bugs then please send me details.

Roland's Graphical Patient Profiler

Unix tutorials and shell scripts

As a sas programmer working on Linux/Unix, you may think you do not need to learn Unix beyond knowing how to use some of the common commands. This is largely true but if you work in a high-production environment, such as clinical trials reporting, then having a good knowledge of Unix commands and being able to write shell scripts can increase your efficiency and make your work easier, so learning more about it becomes worthwhile. To help you in this, I have written several pages to do with Unix and using it with SAS software.

If you have never written shell scripts before and your knowledge of Unix is limited then you are better off using this link.

If you already have a shell script library you use and you want to hunt for more useful tips and shell scripts then go direct to this page.

Clinical reporting macros %unistats and %npcttab

There are two major clinical reporting macros I wrote for the Spectre (Clinical) reporting system named %npcttab and %unistats. They rely on some other macros. They are designed so that you can run them independently of the clinical reporting system they were designed to work with. All the documentation on how to use them comes with the Spectre (Clinical) e-book that you can download in the next section but to give you an idea on how the %unistats macro works and what it does there is a short PowerPoint demonstration you can link to below. You will see actual code run and output produced.
unistats.pps

Through late 2007 and early 2008 I put a lot of work into upgrading these macros so the current documentation is not up to date. I'll be updating and moving this documentation out of the Spectre e-book and into this web site when and if time allows. This may take some time as it has now reached the stage when I must stop working on these macros due to other commitments. I now no longer support these macros for users who use them for free. As for fixing bugs, although these may get reported to me it may take me a long time to fix them. I use these macros myself and tend to fix bugs when they affect my own work. They are highly complex macros and fixing a bug and updating the documentation to go with it can take up to 8 hours. This is time I can no longer afford. The only way I can justify this work is if users have a support contract with me.

A new major version of %unistats (and %unicatrep) is planned that will have added a dsparams= parameter to define a single-observation dataset whose variable names and their values will be converted to macro parameters of the same name and their values. This is for advanced users (as no checking will be done). The reason this is needed is because the number of macro parameters will be increased to allow for different ODS reporting styles and for this it becomes easier to store values in a sas dataset. I plan to release these versions in 2009, as I have other commitments for 2008, but these releases will be brought forward if those with a support contract with me request it.

Spectre (Clinical)

Spectre (Clinical) is a clinical reporting system I wrote from late 2003 onwards. It used to have its own web site but now you have to download it and set it up on your PC as an e-book. It is more suited to being an e-book as it is of an advanced technical nature and not something you can "dip into" and browse. It is a full and complete clinical reporting system with shell scripts, sas macros and extensive documentation. Its SAS macros are the same ones you can download from this web site so you will not find any more macros there.

You can download Spectre using the link at the end of this section. What follows is the current status of Spectre that you can download.
Bugs and changes log
spectre.zip (documentation) - 16 Feb 2008
macros.zip (macros) - 03 Aug 2008
scripts.zip (scripts) - 29 Jul 2007

Spectre (Clinical) can be downloaded from the following page which will also give instructions on how to set it up as an e-book.
Spectre download
 
 

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