The NESTED Procedure

You must include a CLASS statement with PROC NESTED specifying the classification variables for the analysis.

Values of a variable in the CLASS statement denote the levels of an effect. The name of that variable is also the name of the corresponding effect. The second effect is assumed to be nested within the first effect, the third effect is assumed to be nested within the second effect, and so on.

By default, class levels are determined from the entire formatted values of the CLASS variables. Note that this represents a slight change from previous releases in the way in which class levels are determined. Prior to SAS 9, class levels were determined using no more than the first eight characters of the formatted values, except for numeric variables with no explicit format, for which class levels were determined from the raw numeric values. If you want to revert to this previous behavior, you can use the TRUNCATE option in the CLASS statement. In any case, you can use formats to group values into levels. Refer to the discussion of the FORMAT procedure in the Base SAS Procedures Guide, and the discussions for the FORMAT statement and SAS formats in SAS Language Reference: Dictionary.

Note: The data set must be sorted by the classification variables in the order in which they are given in the CLASS statement. Use PROC SORT to sort the data if they are not already sorted.

You can specify the following option in the CLASS statement after a slash (/):