Pagesave for SAS transport problem

[Gordon Greer]

Greetings,

I'm trying to write a program to transfer some series in our model from EViews into a SAS compatible format using the pagesave command. The line of code I am using is as follows:

PAGESAVE(type=sasxport, mode=update) test.xpt @keep G_US{%model}_DATA @smpl 1980:1 %END_FCST

When I run my program, the .xpt file is generated, but the program bugs up on the command. I re-ran the program with logmode all running and got the following notification:

PAGESAVE(type=sasxport, mode=update) test.xpt @keep G_US2015a_DATA @smpl 1980:1 " 2025:4"
Analyzing dataset: obtaining table count
Opening table...
'bopcrntac' is not a legal column name in SAS Transport (XPORT) file datasets in "PAGESAVE(TYPE=SASXPORT, MODE=UPDATE) TEST.XPT ...

I've not generated a SAS transport file with EViews before and am trying to figure out what the error here is resulting from. I'm leaning in one of two directions. One is the length of the variable name: I think the length of a series for SAS is allowed to be 32 characters long, but that might differ depending on the version. The other is that somehow the quotation marks around the series shown in the logmode are also being put into the file, which is why the command is getting flagged.

All of the series in the group I am dealing with are less than 32 characters long and only consist of English letters, numerals, and underscores, so I can't pin down what's going wrong here. Any ideas? I'm running EViews 8.1 (I can troubleshoot on 9, but I'm waiting until 9.1 to rely on submitting content).

Thanks,
Gordon

[EViews Gareth]

I believe the type of sasxport file we create only supports series names up to 8 characters.


As an aside, I wouldn't bet on there being a 9.1 - we don't always create minor releases.

[Gordon Greer]

Okay. Are there any plans to increase the character limit for sasxport files in the near future? I haven't done a string count on all of our series, but I think 16 characters should cover everything in our model that we send to clients. If not, we can put this project on hold.

[EViews Gareth]

A quick Google check would indicate that sasxport doesn't support more than 8 characters at all (although I'm happy to be proven wrong).