**StudySAS Blog: Mastering Clinical Data Management with SAS**

Most of the SAS programmers think that the Metadata concepts (Dictionary tables and SASHELP views) are advanced SAS topics, in fact it is not. I tried here to explain the concept precise and clear…… Here, I will cover the following topics…… Introduction to SAS metadata How to see what’s in the tables How to use the tables, using several real-world examples Advantages What are Dictionary Tables 4 ? Dictionary tables are created and automatically maintained by SAS system at run time to store information related to SAS data libraries, SAS system options, SAS catalogs, and external files associated with the currently running SAS session. CATALOGS, COLUMNS, EXTFILES, INDEXES, MEMBERS, MACRO, OPTIONS, TABLES, TITLES, AND VIEW are these objects which provide detailed information about the SAS files. DICTIONARY tables are special read-only PROC SQL tables. They retrieve information about all the SAS data libraries, SAS data sets, SAS system options, and external files that are associat...

Here is the new Proc compare.sas program, I have developed ....to compare all the datasets in 2 directories(testing and production) at once and to quick check any mismatches. Proc compare only check if there is any mismatches between the datasets in 2 directories. If any, it reports otherwise it will give us a note saying that: Note: No unequal Values were found. All values compared are exactly equal. See the proc compare snap shot: What if any dataset has the length more than 8, and what if any variable length more than 40 and what if the dataset name has more than 8 characters etc... Proc Compare doesn't address this issue. I have developed the following program to address this issue. It’s a mandatory that we need to follow certain requirements when we are preparing for an electronic submission to the FDA. The following are some of the QC checks FDA requirements: 1) The length of a dataset name & variable name shouldn’t be more than 8 characters. 2) The length data set labe...

Sometimes, we need to keep the name and path of the executing program in the FOOTNOTE of the generated table or listings. I have always created a macro variable using the %let statement and, then I called the Macro variable in the footnote statement to get the name of the program. Eventhough it is simple.. it may not be suitable when we write application which need to self document... Here is another technique which can be used to retrieve the pathname and filename (last executed) ..... To get the last opened filename: proc sql noprint; select scan (xpath,-1, ' \ ') into :progname from sashelp.vextfl where upcase( xpath ) like '%.SAS' ; quit ; %put &progname; result: filename.sas or data _null_; set sashelp.vextfl( where = ( upcase ( xpath ) like '%.SAS' )); call symput ( 'program' , scan ( xpath , - 1 , '\' )); run ; %put &program; result: filename.sas To get path name ... then .. use the following code; ...