SAS Stored Procedure User Enters List

Question

Is it possible to created a Stored Procedure in SAS Enterprise Guide and allow the user to enter in a list of values, without having to manually enter in the list?

I use more Base SAS than EG, so I'm not an expert on Stored Procedures. Currently, an analyst in my area may have to search for a list of values like so:

012345678
123456789
231456789
091236574
439857345
120129038
230918239
....
....
N

and is using a Stored Procedure that was built to enter in these values. However, this is not efficient as this last can be >40 values, and SAS will only allow you to enter in one at a time.

I've been messing around with the prompt manager for an hour or so and haven't had any luck. I've also tried 'User selects from a static list', using an excel doc that I imported. Which worked great ad-hoc, but, because the values will always be different, I can't figure out how to make EG first import this excel doc, then bring up the prompt for her to select all the (new) values, then run the rest of the program.

Also, it seems that I would have to change the 'Static Value List' in the prompt manager every time the doc was imported, even if the rest of the program was conditioned on the import of the excel doc. I'm going to continue playing around with this, but looking for ideas as to if anyone has done this previously.

Answer 1

Sounds like you want "select multiple values from a dynamic list". I suggest you read the excel file that holds all the response options into a SAS dataset. Then register that dataset in the SAS metadata server. When you create a dynamic prompt you point to the source SAS dataset that holds the response options. After creating the prompt, you can update the dataset any time you want (add/delete records), and then STP user will see those updated response options in the prompts.

It may also be possible to register an Excel file in metadata instead of reading it into a SAS dataset. But I always try to limit Excel usage as much as possible.