Understanding ODS Destinations

The DOCUMENT destination enables you to restructure, navigate, and replay your data in different ways and to different destinations as you like without needing to rerun your analysis or repeat your database query. The DOCUMENT destination makes your entire output stream available in "raw" form and accessible to you to customize. The output is kept in the original internal representation as a data component plus a table template. When the output is in a DOCUMENT form, it is possible to rearrange, restructure, and reformat without rerunning your analysis. Unlike other ODS destinations, the DOCUMENT destination has a GUI interface. However, everything that you can do through the GUI, you can also do with batch commands using the ODS DOCUMENT statement and the DOCUMENT procedure.

Prior to SAS 9, each procedure or DATA step produced output that was sent to each destination that you specified. Although you could always send your output to as many destinations as you wanted, you needed to rerun your procedure or data query if you decided to use a destination that you had not originally designated. The DOCUMENT destination eliminates the need to rerun procedures or repeat data queries by enabling you to store your output objects and replay them to different destinations.

The LISTING destination produces output that looks the same as the traditional SAS output.

The LISTING destination enables you to produce traditional SAS output with the same look and presentation as it had in previous versions of SAS.

Because most procedures share some of the same table templates, the output is more consistent. For example, if you have two different procedures producing an ANOVA table, they will both produce it in the same way because each procedure uses the same template to describe the table. However, there are three procedures that do not use a default table template to produce their output: the PRINT procedure, the REPORT procedure, and the TABULATE procedure's n-way tables. These procedures use the structure that you specify in your program code to define their tables.

The OUTPUT destination produces SAS output data sets. Because ODS already knows the logical structure of the data and its native form, ODS can create a SAS data set that represents exactly the same resulting data set that the procedure worked with internally. The output data sets can be used for further analysis, or for sophisticated reports in which you want to combine similar statistics across different data sets into a single table. You can easily access and process your output data sets using all of the SAS data set features. For example, you can access your output data using variable names and perform WHERE-expression processing just as you would process data from any other SAS data set.

The HTML destination produces HTML 4.0 output that contains embedded style sheets. You can, however, produce HTML 3.2 output using the HTML3 statement. The HTML destination is the default destination that opens when you start your SAS session. Thus, ODS is always being used, even when you do not explicitly invoke ODS.

The HTML destination can create some or all of the following:

If you do not want to link to your output, then you do not have to create a table of contents, a table of pages, or a frame file. However, if your output is very large, you might want to create a table of contents and a table of pages for easier reading and transversing through your file.

The HTML destination is intended only for online use, not for printing. To print hard-copies of the output objects, use the PRINTER destination.

The same way as table templates describe table layout and style attributes describe the output style, tagsets describe how to produce markup language output. You can use a tagset that SAS supplies or you can create your own tagset using the TEMPLATE procedure. Similar to table templates and style attributes, tagsets enable you to modify your markup language output. For example, you can specify each variety of XML as a new tagset. SAS supplies you with a collection of XML tagsets and enables you to produce a customized variety of XML.

The important point is that you can implement either a tagset that SAS supplies or a customized tagset that you created. You do not have to wait for the next release of SAS. The additional capability to modify and create your own tagsets by using PROC TEMPLATE gives you greater flexibility in customizing your output.

Because the MARKUP destination is so flexible, you can use either the SAS tagsets or a tagset that you created. For a complete list of the markup language tagsets that SAS supplies, see the section on listing tagset names in ODS MARKUP Statement. To learn how to define your own tagsets, see the section on methods to create your own tagsets in TEMPLATE Procedure: Creating Markup Language Tagsets.

The MARKUP destination cannot replace ODS PRINTER or ODS RTF destinations because it cannot do text measurement. Therefore, it cannot produce output for a page description language or a hybrid language like RTF, which requires all of the text to be measured and placed at a specific position on the page.

However, SAS 9.2 introduces a measured markup destination that is based on the traditional markup and traditional page layout destinations. The first production tagset for this destination is for RTF. Others are planned. The primary distinction of this tagset is that SAS can determine where page breaks occur in a markup language implementation. See ODS TAGSETS.RTF Statement for specific information.

The PRINTER destination produces output for the following:

The PRINTER destinations produce ODS output that contains page description languages: they describe precise positions where each line of text, each rule, and each graphical element are to be placed on the page. In general, you cannot edit or alter these formats. Therefore, the output from ODS PRINTER is intended to be the final form of the report.

RTF produces output for Microsoft Word. Other applications can read RTF files, but the RTF output might not work successfully with them.

The RTF destination enables you to view and edit the RTF output. ODS does not define the vertical measurement, which means that SAS does not determine the optimal place to position each item on the page. For example, page breaks are not always fixed, so you do not want your RTF output tables to split at inappropriate places when you edit your text. Your tables can remain whole and intact on one page or they can have logical breaks where you specify.

Because Microsoft Word needs to know the widths of table columns and it cannot adjust tables if they are too wide for the page, ODS measures the width of the text and tables (horizontal measurement). Therefore, SAS can set all of the column widths properly and divide the table into panels if it is too wide to fit on a single page.

In short, when SAS produces RTF output for input to Microsoft Word, it determines the horizontal measurement. Microsoft Word controls the vertical measurement. Because Microsoft Word can determine how much space is on the page, your tables display consistently even after you make changes to your RTF file.

However, when you use measured RTF, which is implemented when you use the ODS TAGSETS.RTF statement, you can specify how and where page breaks occur. You can also specify when to place titles and footnotes into the body of a page. SAS becomes responsible for the implicit page breaks instead of Microsoft Word. See ODS TAGSETS.RTF Statement for specific information.