Documenting SAS Data Sets

The power of TechWriter comes from its ability to leverage information from your database. In this topic we will show you how to document SAS data sets by including descriptions directly within the data set itself as an alternative to creating annotations within TechWriter. However, it should be noted that this method is fairly limited due to the restricted size of SAS text labels which can be no longer than 40 characters in length. In many cases, you will want to use the TechWriter Annotation editor to manage these descriptions after you have added the SAS data set to your TechWriter project.

Documenting Tables

TechWriter uses the text labels associated with the tables in your SAS data set for default descriptions. You can modify these labels using a SAS procedure with the following syntax for each table you want to document:

ALTER TABLE <table> LABEL='<description>';

where <table> is the name of the database table and <description> is the text of the description you want to create.

Documenting Table Columns

TechWriter uses the text labels associated with the table columns in your SAS data set for default descriptions. You can modify these labels using a SAS procedure with the following syntax for each table you want to document:

ALTER TABLE <table> MODIFY <column> LABEL='<description>';

where <table> is the name of the database table, <column> is the name of the column and <description> is the text of the description you want to create.