Macro Core

Much quality. Many standards. The Macro Core library exists to save time and development effort! Herein ye shall find a veritable host of production quality SAS macros. These are a mix of tools, utilities, functions and code generators that are useful in the context of Application Development on the SAS platform. Contributions are welcomed.

Components

Base library

OS independent
Not metadata aware
No X command
Prefixes: mf, mp

Meta library

OS independent
Metadata aware
No X command
Prefixes: mm

xcmd library:

OS specific
Metadata aware
X command enabled
Prefixes: mw,mu,mx

Installation

First, download the repo to a location your SAS system can access. Then update your sasautos path to include the components you wish to have available,eg:

options insert=(sasautos="/your/path/macrocore/base");
options insert=(sasautos="/your/path/macrocore/meta");

The above can be done directly in your sas program, via an autoexec, or an initialisation program.

Standards

File Properties

filenames much match macro names
filenames must be lowercase
macro names must be lowercase
one macro per file
prefixes:
- mf for macro functions (can be used in open code).
- mp for macro procedures (which generate sas code)
- mm for metadata macros (interface with the metadata server).
- mw for macros that only work in Windows (should work in ALL versions of windows)
- mu for macros that only work in Unix type environments (should work in ALL types of unix environment)
- mx for macros that use X command and will work in both windows and unix environments.
follow verb-noun convention
unix style line endings (lf)
individual lines should be no more than 80 characters long
UTF-8
no trailing white space
no trailing empty lines

Header Properties

The Macro Core documentation is created using doxygen. A full list of attributes can be found here but the following are most relevant:

file. This needs to be present in order to be recognised by doxygen.
brief. This is a short (one sentence) description of the macro.
details. A longer description, which can contain doxygen markdown.
param. Name of each input param followed by a description.
return. Explanation of what is returned by the macro.
version. The EARLIEST SAS version in which this macro is known to work.
author. Author name, contact details optional
copyright. Must be GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3.

All macros must be commented in the doxygen format, to enable the online documentation.

Coding Standards

Indentation = 2 spaces. No tabs!
Macro variables should not have the trailing dot (&var not &var.) unless necessary to prevent incorrect resolution
The closing %mend; should not contain the macro name.
All macros should be defined with brackets, even if no variables are needed - ie %macro x(); not %macro x;
Mandatory parameters should be positional, all optional parameters should be keyword (var=) style.
All dataset references to be 2 level (eg work.blah, not blah).
Avoid naming collisions! All macro variables should be local scope. Use system generated work tables where possible - eg data ; set sashelp.class; run; data &output; set &syslast; run;

General Notes

All macros should be compatible with SAS versions from support level B and above (so currently 9.2 and later). If an earlier version is not supported, then the macro should say as such in the header documentation, and exit gracefully (eg %if %sysevalf(&sysver<9.3) %then %return).

sspkmnd/macrocore