Tell SAS not to add newly generated tables on the Process Flow

Question

I have a SAS code that creates a lot of intermediary tables for my calculations. Thing is, I don\'t really care about this tables after the job is done, I only care to the final

Answer 1

If you set the option "Maximum Number of output data sets to add to the project" (under Results General) to zero, it will not add any datasets to the project, but they'll still be available to view from the Server -> Library view (they'll be added to the flow at the point you request them).

Answer 2

Under SAS 9.1.x and 9.2.x (for Windows), it's possible to suppress the display of datasets in SAS client environments by prefixing the dataset name with "_TO". So in your code and/or tasks, you could call all your intemediate datasets _TO<DataSetName>, and they won't clutter up your process flow. But they will still be there and can be referenced in code and tasks.

If you do this and you're using tasks, note that it might be tricky to work out how to use the output data from a task as the input for another, if you can't see the dataset to select it. If you have trouble with this, comment on this post and we can address that.

Note that this "_TO" prefix thing is an undocumented, "hidden" feature that is to be deprecated in 9.3 - see this blog for details.

Answer 3

I know this question is a year and a half old now, but if you are working with intermediate tables that can be deleted after you get the final results, SAS EG has a built in macro you can use for deleting these tables:

%_eg_conditional_dropds([table1], [table2], ... ,[table-n]);