Well, yeah, I was just using airports and dictionary.columns as an example of a similar dictionary. In the CDISC implementation guide, they give the tables, variables, labels, , type, formats, ... in a data dictionary format. So, I don't have an actual dataset that I can use 'like' with.

Since there's a whole slew of these things that need creating (and across many different studies), I was hoping to pull the dictionary in using Excel and have some way to use that metadata to create the actual working dataset.

-----Original Message----- From: Arthur Tabachneck [mailto:art297@NETSCAPE.NET] Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 5:17 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU; Ken Barz Subject: Re: Dataset from Dictionary?

Ken,

I'm a bit confused. Wouldn't something as simple as:

proc sql noprint; create table airportdictionary like SASUSER.AIRPORTS ; quit;

do what you are trying to accomplish?

Art --------- On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:59:49 -0600, Ken Barz <Ken.Barz@CPCMED.ORG> wrote:

>I'm doing some work aiming towards CDISC compliance and I was wondering >if there's an easy way to go from a data dictionary type of dataset >(e.g.) > > > >proc sql; > > create table airportdictionary as > > select * > > from dictionary.columns > > where libname='SASUSER' > > and memname='AIRPORTS'; > >quit; > > > >and create an empty dataset 'airport' using the variable names, lengths, >types, ... already contained in the dictionary. I know I can data step, >or proc sql, a solution, but I was wondering if there's already some >form of proc or a macro out there that already does this? > >Thanks, > >Ken