Adding Subversion® Operations to the SAS® Enhanced Editor
Oscar F. Cheung, Kenneth W. Borowiak · 2015
Apache™ Subversion® (SVN) is an open-source version control system whose use is growing amongst clinical trial programming departments. SVN can be used for versioning many files types, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, XML, RTF and SAS® data sets and logs. However, clinical trial programmers have a valuable tool in SVN at their disposal for tracking the development and maintenance of SAS programs. This paper demonstrates how to enable two of the most common SVN operations, namely SVN ADD and SVN COMMIT, in the SAS Enhanced Editor. SAS programs are an ideal candidate for being managed under version control. Programs are often revised a number of times as they are being developed, modified for changes in specifications and scope, errors are found and peer reviewed. The number of programs to support a clinical trials project can be quite voluminous and may need to be maintained over a number of years. Moreover, there may be multiple programmers who will be editing the file, either somewhat concurrently, in collaboration or in succession. The principle of traceability can be applied to programs just as it is the data files provided to regulatory agencies. In order to track the evolution of a SAS program, even with version control, the onus still resides with programmers. They must still commit their programs in order to reap the benefits of version control, such as not losing any edits and being able to restore code that has since been removed. The easier it is to commit files the more likely it will be done in the optimal way with the optimal frequency. Committing programs with SVN can be done with command-line calls (e.g. batch scripts or system commands in a SAS program) or with its GUI interface TortoiseSVN. For programmers doing program development with SAS Enhanced Editor, the latter of the choices is not ideal because the commit operation needs to happen outside of the SAS environment. We will demonstrate in this paper how to add the SVN operations ADD and COMMIT to the Enhanced Editor environment to facilitate the ease in which SAS users can apply some key version control activities to program development.