If you have ever wanted to pull a quick document out showing what is contained in a Information Map, then this post by Chris from last year will show you how.

It refers to the following tech support note Sample 39539: Creating a PDF that documents the contents of a SAS® Information Map.

Chris’s post also includes a link to some additional code he wrote that provides even more details of the infomap.

Not sure if Chris’s example will work in 9.1, as it uses the new SAS 9.2 Infomap libname engine.

But the original tech support code should work in SAS 9.1 as it uses the sasiome engine (slightly undocumented feature of SAS 9.1).

One of the talented guys that worked on a project with us a while ago wrote the equivalent capability to extract the information maps developed for the customer into static html pages (which we embedded in the client wiki) so that we could surface the infomation maps contents to the users.  He apparently had to work around with some issues with XML tags and escape characters from memory, so im guessing he was parsing the XML.

As an aside a few years ago we developed a Metadata Web Service that dynamically queried the SAS metadata server and displayed the metadata as a webpage.

The goal was to dynamically display the metadata content for libnames, tables, users, etc without having to export it manually.

After a bit of effort we even were able to acces the Infomap content (Infomaps are no stored as standard metadata object on SAS 9.1)

The issue we struck was the client was running 32 bit windows and the Metadata repository was very large, so if we accessed the metadata via the web service it would run out of memory and crash (of course it worked on our small dev and test metadata instances!).

Havent retested now we have SAS 9.2 and can use 64 bit windows, so might have to resurrect it for a retest.