At 09:53 AM 9/13/99 -0400, King, Raymond wrote: >Faith, in my original post I mentioned the SAS-ODBC driver. I was a little >imprecise. What I meant was the SAS Universal ODBC Driver (now in ver. >1.1). This driver should allow Cold Fusion to access SAS data sets (among >other SAS objects) without the additional "layer of complexity" in >SAS/SHARE. > >As you mention Cold Fusion is a great dev platform, so I'm curious as to why >very few people (if any) have used it (and them that have aren't talking) >with SAS data. > >Seems a fairly economical way to go to give access to non-SAS users. > >Does the Universal driver help SAS to fall under the category of what you >call "ODBC-compliant databases"? > >Regards, >Raymond <SNIP>

Faith again... I went to SAS's site and downloaded the trial version of the SAs Universal ODBC Driver just to satisfy my curiosity. Installed the baby with no problem. i'm on an NT 4.0 server platform.

i created an ODBC datasource "cand" pointing at a candidate SAS dataset. I then wrote this teeny simple Cold Fusion program just to see if i can read the SAS cand dataset:

<CFQUERY NAME="testSASODBC" DATASOURCE="cand"> SELECT * FROM cand </CFQUERY> <CFOUTPUT query="testSASODBC"> fname is: #fname#<br> city is: #city# </CFOUTPUT>

what this does is query the cand datasource and select all columns from it.

then i sue the cfoutput tag to output the results of my query. all i'm interested in is fname and city. notice that coldfusion need you to put pound (#) signs around the cf variables.

I then stored it in a subdirectory of my webserver directory as temptest/sastocftest.cfm Note: coldfusion source has the extension of .cfm

my test webserver is at faith.hypno.net so i typed faith.hypno.net/temptest/sastocftest.cfm

here are the results: fname is: Randy city is: Ann Arbor fname is: Sudesh city is: Norfolk fname is: Loan city is: La Mirada fname is: Kimberly city is: Arlington fname is: Rene city is: Hebron fname is: Mike city is: San Francisco fname is: Donalee city is: Elk Grove Village

notice how I didn't put any html <br> line breaks in my source code thus i get sloppy output but you get the gist of what i'm doing, right?

now i wanna know if i can write to a sas dataset via the ODBC universal driver.

So I performed an INSERT query. Guess what? NOT! You can only read (query) a database via the select stmnt. As written on SAS's site, "The SAS Universal ODBC driver enables you to open and query the following types of data sources from Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT applications that support the ODBC standard..." NOTE that the operative phrase is "read and query". This may be good enough for you but I can't envision using it for a full blown app. It is indeed useful for presenting data and allowing your users to query the data!

VOILA!

this took me all of 10 minutes to do with the download, the install, and the testing! Took more time to write this darn email.

Happy and safe computing ladies and gents! Hope to see some of ya'll in Los Angeles this October at the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference. There I will be giving a 3.5 hour workshop on web application tools from HTML to CGI to web to database connectivity with a teeny emphasis on the SAS Software. This is so folks can have a better idea of what the rest of the world is doing in terms of dynamic web based apps.

Also, we're looking for a few good volunteers to work the Internet, Intranet and the Web section. Are there any takers?

Best... Faith _____________________________________________________________ Faith Sloan Email: info@frsa.com President/CEO Voice: (415) 626-9796 FRS Associates, LLC Pager: (888) 562-8812 San Francisco, CA 94114 http://www.frsa.com ibQ, Ltd, Internetwork Division http://www.ibq-ltd.com Email: faith@ibq-ltd.com Shop The Planet! http://www.bpstore.com Use ID# 4300894501 - Win up to $500 Shopping Sprees! FREE PC http://www.handteam.com/ibqltd Small Office/Home Office/FREE EMAIL http://www.clubinternetwork.com Bodybuilding for the Masses http://www.frsa.com/bbpage.shtml