Stored Processes. Brilliant. An excellent (and easy) means of packaging your SAS code and making it available in parameter-driven form through Enterprise Guide, Microsoft Office applications (through the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office), Information Maps & Web Report Studio, the Stored Process Web Application, your own web applications. And PROC STP.
Yes, there's a PROC STP! It's not in the Base SAS 9.3 Procedures Guide, Second Edition, you need to look in the SAS 9.3 Stored Processes: Developer's Guide to discover it. It's worth looking, because the PROC offers a lot of stored process goodness.
Firstly, it's worth noting that PROC STP's LIST statement will show details about a specified stored process, including where the code is stored (don't forget that SAS V9.3 optionally allows stored process code to be stored in metadata instead of as an external file).
However, surely the best use of PROC STP is as a "super-macro". PROC STP allows you to call a stored process from any base SAS code (including another stored process or DI Studio user-written transform). The PROC's INPUTDATA, INPUTFILE, and INPUTPARAM statements allow your inputs to be specified, and their are OUTPUTxxx equivalents too.
It's an excellent addition to a SAS programmer's toolbox. However, I need to offer a couple of word of caution:
PASSWORD. To access the stored process definition, your code must have established a metadata server connection. Thus, in many cases, you will need to code an OPTIONS statement with a number of METAxxx parameters, including METAPASS with an appropriate password.
LOCALITY. The stored process code won't be executed as a stored process. Frankly, I'm not 100% clear on how it executes. It is not within a stored process server, but it is also not executed within the calling code's SAS session. It appears that a new workspace session is created, with its own WORK library, etc, and the stored process code is executed within this new environment. Allied with this is the fact that the stored process code must be directly accessible to your local environment. In practice, this means that the code needs to be in the metadata server or on your local server.
I don't yet have a lot of experience using PROC STP myself, and I haven't found much experience on the web either. I'm looking forward to experimenting more, and to seeing lots of quality papers on the subject at next year's SAS Global Forum.
