About Packages: Package Content

Package: Definition

A package is a container for knowledge, or digital content, that is generated or collected for delivery to a consumer.

Knowledge takes the form of package entries, which can be either of two types:

• SAS results
• unstructured content.

SAS Results

A category of package entry type is SAS results, which can take the form of any of the following:

• SAS catalog
• SAS data set
• SAS database (such as FDB and MDDB)
• SAS SQL view.

Note: A package that contains only SAS results is referred to as a result set package.

Unstructured Content

Unstructured content is any package entry that is created external to SAS. Supported unstructured content types include the following:

• binary file (such as Excel, GIF, JPG, PDF, PowerPoint, and Word)
• HTML file (including ODS output)
• reference string (such as URL)
• text file (such as a SAS program)
• viewer file (such as an HTML or plain text template that formats SAS file items for viewing in e-mail).

File Name Extensions for Package Entry Types

Each entry in a package is implicitly contained in a file whose file name extension reflects the entry type. Knowing file name extensions might be useful when retrieving packages from the archive and WebDAV transports.

Default file name extensions follow:

.csv - Comma separated values
.ref - Reference 
.sac - SAS Catalog 
.sad - SAS Dataset 
.sam - SAS MDDB 
.sav - SAS SQL View 
.spk - Nested archive