Tuesday, 5 November 2013

NOTE: Spicing-Up Your Enterprise Guide With Custom Tasks - Checking Cardinality

Last week I wrote about a couple of neat custom tasks from Metacoda that would allow you to search metadata from within Enterprise Guide (EG) and the Add-In for Microsoft Office (AMO). Custom tasks are a great way to augment the functionality you get in EG and AMO.

I recently saw Chris Hemedinger write in The SAS Dummy blog about a custom task to check cardinality that he'd written. If you're into hierarchies, dimensions or forms of analytics, cardinality is doubtless a frequently used part of your vocabulary. In essence, cardinality of a variable specifies the number of distinct values of that variable.

Back in May, Chris published some good advice about installing custom tasks, taking into account changes made in EG 5.1 and later. Worth a read.

If you're new to the idea of custom tasks, the SAS Talks archive contains a one hour Introduction to Custom Tasks video from earlier this year.

If you would like to broaden your knowledge of custom tasks and start to write some for yourself, I highly recommend Chris's book Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET. Examples from the book (with source) are available too.

All-in-all, if you haven't already given attention to custom tasks, you've no longer got any excuse to ignore them!