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Introduction
The goal of SAS programming documentation is to communicate the pertinent
information in a concise and accessible manner. This is accomplished by delivering
the documentation in a form that allows the reviewer to navigate to the portion which
pertains to the derivation of a specific variable within a SAS dataset.
The Trialex documentation tools will automate the creation of this documentation if
certain standard commenting styles are established. The system will automatically
capture the comments and organize them in a hyperlinked document. The following will
describe the standard commenting style.
Style Specification
%*<Variable Definition: data.variable>*;
... /* comments */
%*</Variable Definition: data.variable>*;
%*<SAS Definition: data.variable>*;
... sas code
%*</SAS Definition: data.variable>*;
| Where |
Represents... |
| Variable Definition |
This section refers to SAS comments. This pertains to a variable
specified in the data.variable parameter. |
| SAS Definition |
This section refers to SAS code. This pertains to a
variable specified in the var parameter. |
| data.variable |
This pertains to a SAS variable which is expressed by a two
level dot notation. The item proceeding the dot refers to the dataset name.
The item following the dot is the variable name. |
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Details
The comments styles defined in this section is used by the Trialex System to
systematically document all programs. Since an algorithm is applied to parse the
information, it is crucial that the information entered is precise. The following
are some recommendations that may help in editing these comments.
- Definitions (SAS or Variable) cannot overlap on top of one another
-- use the multiple variable definition for the same block.
- The beginning and the end of the strings recognized by the Trialex system are critical
(i.e. ">*;").
- Sometimes the creation of derived variables may be scattered in different sections of
the program and may include several data and proc steps. In these cases, the same Variable
and SAS definitions can be repeated for these multiple sections. The Trialex system will
take these blocks of code or derivations and automatically regroup them with hyperlinks.
Example
%* <Variable Definition: a_ptinfo.ptid> *;
/*
This variable is defined by blah, blah
blah, blah...
*/
%* </Variable Definition: a_ptinfo.ptid> *;
%* <SAS Definition: a_ptinfo.ptid> *;
data a_ptinfo;
set warehouse.ptid;
ptid = put(pt,best.);
run;
%* </SAS Definition: a_ptinfo.ptid> *;
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