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sassas-macro

SAS code behaves differently in interactive and batch modes

I have the following code that is running inside a macro. When it is run in interactive mode, it runs absolutely fine, no errors or warning. That was the case for last two year.

The same code has now been deployed in batch mode and it generates a warning WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference FIRSTRECCOUNT not resolved. and no value assigned to macro variable.

My question is, does anyone have any ideas why batch mode and interactive mode would behave differently?

Here some more information:

  1. The dataset is being created and it is in work library.

  2. The dataset does get opened by data step.

  3. `firstreccount' doesn't get initialiased anywhere else in the program
  4. I have search sas community. There is a topic here, but I don't have the same errors in batch initilisation as described in the answer.
  5. Detailed information on the warning but it doesn't explain by it would work in interactive mode, but not in batch mode.

.

1735        %LET FIRSTSET = work.dataset1;

1744        DATA _NULL_;
1745            IF 0 THEN
1746                SET &FIRSTSET NOBS=X;
1747            CALL SYMPUT('FIRSTRECCOUNT' ,X);
1748            STOP;
1749        RUN;       

1755        DATA _NULL_;
1756            IF 0 THEN
1757                SET &SECONDSET NOBS=X;
1758            CALL SYMPUT('SECONDRECOUNT' ,X);
1759            STOP;
1760        RUN;
WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference FIRSTRECCOUNT not resolved.

Update:

So I have attempted to replicate the error by copying the code with warning into a separate scheduled flow, but it didn't cause any errors at all.

By the way, the original job was deployed from SAS DI studio. I have checked all lines in user written code nodes and made sure that the length was within 80 characters as recommended by @RawFocus, @RobertPentridge, but it didn't solve the issue. As recomended by @data_null_ I have checked VALIDVARNAME and it was different between interactive (value of "any") and batch mode (value of "V7") but changing these hasn't made any difference.

I have rewritted the logic to get the number of observations by calling attr for an open dataset. This eliminated the warning, but program would still fail with warning popping out in different places. It made me think Robert Partridge is correct. At the same time, I got an error that a macro not being resolved. The macro was inserted by DI studio to collect performance MI even that the job wasn't meant to be collecting MI. This made me think that SAS DI studio is not generating code correctly when deploying it, so I manually edited the deployed code to remove offending macro call and I also spotted that there was one line of code with MD5 function that was too long on one line because of a number of parameters being passed to it, so I inserted some white space. And finally the problem was fixed!!

I still need to do something about the job because when it will get redeployed from SAS DI, it will generate the same errors again. I don't have time to look into this further at the moment.

Conclusion: what you write in SAS DI and what gets deployed could be slightly different which could cause syntax parse to throw errors in random places. So I will mark Robert's answer as correct because it got me closer to solving the problem then any other answer.

Solution

  • The problem could be happening above the code snippet you pasted. The parser got into a funk earlier, and ended up issuing warning about code that is perfectly fine.

    Check to make sure that no code within a macro is longer that ~160 chars on a single line. I try to keep my code well below that but long lines of code can run fine interactively and fail in batch - particularly when inside of a macro.