1 Using Recursion to Trace Lineages in the SAS ® ODS Styles.Default Template

As a first step towards learning how to generate customized tables in ODS, it is recommended that the Styles.Default template be written out to the SAS LOG. What greets you in 9.1.3 SAS is a 700-line listing of default values for attributes that are building blocks for 150+ style elements. That the template listing is overwhelming is an unders-tatement. You still don’t have a clue about how style templates generally work in ODS, but you realize that a compre-hensive guide can only be found in the output you are looking at. To translate the ODS Styles.Default template into something useful, inheritance has to be fully expressed. Whole lineages of style elements can then be traced and presented alongside their associated attributes. With the newly formatted guide, you can easily learn what is available when ODS-generated tables require a new appearance. Inheritance falls out when recursion is applied to the Styles.Default template. In this paper, recursion is introduced by showing brief code examples written in macro and PROC SQL. Next, the DATA step that processes Styles.Default recursively is reviewed in detail. Final output is produced in ODS with an HTML destination. Usage of the new guide is deferred to a follow-up paper. PROBLEM DEFINITION There is no way to organize the Styles.Default template by lineage. Instead, members of any given lineage are widel