Web Interface to SAS

George Jakubson, Cornell University

Thanks to Ken Pendell and Patrick Graham for technical advice and to Brenda Lapp for HTML lessons.

If you have trouble, be sure to check the bug list to see what things are currently known to not work.

There are confirmed reports of problems in using the SAS interface if you are using (some versions of) Internet Explorer
rather than Netscape as your web browser.  The reason the problem arises and workarounds are currently unknown.  In the short run, use Netscape (available in the public labs or from home.netscape.com).  We are currently contacting the technical support people to see if we can figure out how to fix the problems.  We apologize for any inconvenience -- this problem has never surfaced before.  The problems seem to appear with version 3.0 of IE, but not with version 3.02.

Note that your netid and location will be logged when you submit a job. If you do not like that, press the Back button now.

Step 1: Enter your netid in the netid box.

Be sure to not leave blank spaces to the left of the first character. Be sure to not leave blank spaces to the right of the last character. Use the backspace key as necessary.
Netid : 

Step 2: Enter your SAS job in the job box.

Special Notes for Writing SAS jobs to use this interface.

Some of the characters that you might want to use in a SAS program will be improperly interpreted by the web interface (because they are reserved characters in HTML). Therefore, you must not use those characters in your SAS program if you want to use this interface. The reserved characters include:

If you want to use the less than (or less than or equal to) operator in SAS, use the characters LT (or LE) rather than the symbols. Similarly, use GT ( or GE) for greater than (or greater than or equal to). You should also use the words AND, OR, and NOT to represent the logical operators rather than use the corresponding symbols.
Automatic lines entered by the interface

The program will automatically enter a number of lines of SAS code at the beginning of your program. Only reenter these lines if you wish to override my defaults.

The lines which will be entered are

1. options statement: set output width to 79 columns and to _not_ center the output. (This makes it easier to look at the file from the terminal.)

2. options statement: set pagesize to a huge number and set the form delimiter to a space. (This reduces the number of page breaks in the output files.)

Moving around and editting within the job box

Use the scrollbars in the job box to move around in the job box and use the scrollbars in the browser window to move around in the browser window

You can freely edit within the job box. You can also paste into the job box from another window if you have copied material from a different window onto the clipboard (or equivalent).

Enter your SAS job in the job box: 

Step 3: Run the SAS job.

To run the SAS job click the RUN button.
Running the job may take a few moments. Your browser will show itself to be busy while the SAS job is running. Please be patient.

When the job is completed, you will get a new page which will contain a link to the output file.

To start over again

If you start over again, yo've got to be sure to get the current versions of all pages, rather than the older versions out of the cache.  There are a number of ways to do this:

Method 1 (should work with most browsers) (thanks to Seth Bowden for the suggestion)

  • set your preferences to "Verify the document each time."
      • In Netscape 3, this is found under "Option-Network_Preferences-Cache".  In Netscape 4, this is found under "Edit-Preferences-Advanced-Cache" and is called "Document in cache is compared to document on network".
Method 2 (will always work, but clears everything)
  • clear the cache (both disk and memory) in the browser, and
  • reload all pages.
      • In Netscape 3  this is in "Options-Network_Preferences-Cache".  In Netscape 4 this is in "Edit-Preferences-Advanced-Cache".
Pressing the Reset button will clear the form.

Returning from whence you came ...

Since I have not yet figured out how to tell the URL from which you got here, you will need to use the Back button on your browser to get out of here.

Comments and Suggestions

Please send comments or suggestions to George Jakubson