HTML, PDF, RTF (and more) all at the same time.

or . . . when is a session not really a session.

In my last post I illustrated explicity creating and using a session. Of course as with all things SAS related, that is not the only way to create a session!

In order for ODS to support creating html page with mixed text and graphics (e.g., a PROC PRINT and a PROC GCHART), ODS uses lightweight sessions. These are sessions without a lot of the overhead of a full session, but which allow a program to write some content, e.g., in the case of ODS, perhaps a graph where the generated HTML contains a link that replays the graph. So while it looks to the user like they are getting a table and graph in one request, there are actually two requests. Run this sample Table and Graph and take a look at the generated HTML for the img tag.

Note that this example is actually a SAS/IntrNet sample from my SAS Press Book . . . . . . but the Stored Process Server works the same way!

The generated link uses the replay program to do that. Upon a review of the generated HTML (just do a View Source in your browser) you see that the replayed graph is actually an entry in a SAS catalog. Well, it turns out that whenever you submit a request for the Stored Process Server to run a program, SAS creates a catalog and the catalog name is available to your program as the macro variable reference &_tmpcat.

And now it gets even more interesting because simply by writing something to that catalog causes SAS to create the lightweight session.

Now lets consider the case where we want to generate an HTML report, but you also want to provide a way for a user to access a printable version of the report (e.g., a PDF file) or an easily editable version (e.g., an RTF file) without having to rerun the reporting code. A lightweight session can be used to so that ODS will write PDF and RTF versions to the &_tmpcat catalog while generating/streaming the HTML version back to the users browser.

Just include statements like this in your program:

  filename pd catalog "&_tmpcat..shoes.pdf";
  filename rt catalog "&_tmpcat..shoes.rtf";

and then use the stpBegin macro for the HTML version and explicit ODS statements for the PDF and RTF versions:

  %stpBegin
  ods pdf file = pd style = sasweb notoc;
  ods rtf file = rt style=sasweb;

then include whatever your reporting code is (e.g., PRINT, TABULATE, REPORT, etc.).

We now need to include some HTML to provide the hyperlinks to that will replay the PDF and/or RTF versions. The following DATA steps creates macro variables whose values are the needed HTML:

  data _null_;
   call symput('replayPDF','''<center><a href="'||&_replay||'shoes.pdf">Printable (PDF)</a></center>''');
   call symput('replayRTF','''<center><a href="'||&_replay||'shoes.rtf">Editable (RTF)</a></center>''');
  run;

and, yea, I know the quoting is UGLY. I promise I'll blog about better ways to do this at some point in the future ;-).

and these ODS HTML statements generate the needed links in the HTML version.

  ods html text = &replayPDF;
  ods html text = &replayRTF;

And, as a bonus, since the ODS HTML statement does not write any content to the PDF or ODS destinations, those versions of the reports do not contain the hyperlink text!

And since the %stpEnd macro generates an

  ODS _ALL_ close;

statement, it will close all of the output destinations for you.

Feel free to check out this sample on my server.

And, of course, there are more examples of sessions and lightweight sessions in Building Web Applications with SAS/IntrNet®: A Guide to the Application Dispatcher. And they work pretty much the same way in the Stored Process Server (with the exception of the one issue highlighted in my PRIOR POSTING).

Happy Sessioning ;-).