Publish Package Interface

The Publish Package Interface consists of SAS CALL routines that enable you to write SAS programs, including stored processes, that create, populate, publish, and retrieve collections of information known as result set packages, or just packages for short.

You first create the package with the PACKAGE_BEGIN CALL routine. This CALL routine assigns a name to the package and any optional name/value pairs that are associated with it. The name is used in later CALL routines to add contents to the package and to publish the package.

The name/value pairs are used to assign metadata to a package or individual package entries. This enables you to create filters that aid in information retrieval. The filters can be used both by subscribers to channels and by programs that search the package archive.

After a package is created, the package is populated by adding package entries with various INSERT_* CALL routines. An entry can be a SAS file (dataset, catalog, SAS MDDB, etc.), or almost any other kind of file, including HTML and images. You can also nest packages by including a package as an entry in another package. Entries are referenced in the order in which they were added to the package.

After the package is built, it is published using the PACKAGE_PUBLISH CALL routine to the relevant delivery transport which can be an E-mail address(es), a message queue, subscribers to a pre-defined channel, a WebDAV-Compliant server, and/or to an archive.

Note: When publishing packages that contain HTML file entries, please take note of the Publish/Retrieve Encoding Behavior.