Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 12:44:12 -0400
Reply-To: Michael Palmer <mcpalmer@ZBI.NET>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Michael Palmer <mcpalmer@ZBI.NET>
Subject: Re: Application Development GUI Choice
In-Reply-To: <A5BA0759F366D51193B90008C786E91F028BA6AA@fedk0014.fic.ferr
ing.com>
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At 05:13 PM 6/12/2002 +0200, Magnus.Mengelbier@ferring.com wrote:
>I have been using both a purpose-built macro (before the XML capability)
>and the new XML support for both data transfers and presentation output
>for an on-going project. We used a simple strategy... since SAS XML output
>is still a little inflexible (better things to come in v9 with TAGSETS ),
>we use XSLT transformations to produce anything but standard output. We
>have SAS-XML for basically in/out of data and to produce simple tabular
>reports.
Sounds like you're dealing with the same problems as we were, data transfer
and reporting, but your solution isn't that much like ours. We needed to
keep the solution 100% base SAS, including XML transformations, so couldn't
use XSLT. The XML support that's come with SAS just hasn't been capable
enough, particularly for exporting XML, but it can't really import the XML
that we want to work with either.
Our solution uses a canonical document, which represents the specific XML
vocabulary that we're working with, and a couple of macro tools for import
and export. One useful property is that the tools are driven by the
canonical document so they are generic. Another nice feature is that the
canonical document drives indexing of the XML document in a way that's
let's us transform it in a DATA-step. That's why we don't need XSLT. It's
actually turned SAS into a good place to work with XML, at least, in our
experience.
Regards,
Michael
Michael Palmer
Zurich Biostatistics, Inc.
www.zbi.net
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