Viewing SAS Data Sets Data in RAD Studio Data Explorer

Embarcadero RAD Studio provides a development environment for Delphi and C++Builder applications. With the CData ODBC Driver for SAS Data Sets, you gain access to live SAS Data Sets data within RAD Studio, abstracting the data into tables, views, and stored procedures that can be used to both retrieve and update SAS Data Sets data. This article will walk through connecting to SAS Data Sets using the Data Explorer.

Configure a Connection to SAS Data Sets

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Set the following connection properties to connect to your SAS DataSet files:

Connecting to Local Files

• Set the Connection Type to "Local." Local files support SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE commands.
• Set the URI to a folder containing SAS files, e.g. C:\PATH\TO\FOLDER\.

Connecting to Cloud-Hosted SAS DataSet Files

While the driver is capable of pulling data from SAS DataSet files hosted on a variety of cloud data stores, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE are not supported outside of local files in this driver.

Set the Connection Type to the service hosting your SAS DataSet files. A unique prefix at the beginning of the URI connection property is used to identify the cloud data store and the remainder of the path is a relative path to the desired folder (one table per file) or single file (a single table). For more information, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

Connecting to SAS Data Sets Data Using Data Explorer

You can create a simple application for displaying SAS Data Sets data by utilizing the CData FireDAC Components for SAS Data Sets and a new VCL Forms Application:

1. Open the Data Explorer in RAD Studio and expand FireDAC.
2. Right-click the ODBC Data Source node in the Data Explorer.
3. Click Add New Connection.
4. Enter a name for the connection.
5. In the FireDAC Connection Editor that appears, set the DataSource property to the name of the ODBC DSN for SAS Data Sets.
6. Back in the Data Explorer, expand the tables for the connection.

7. Create a new VCL Forms application and drag a table (for example: restaurants) onto the form.

8. Select the restaurantsTable object on the form and set the Active property to true.

9. Right-click on the object, bind visually, and link everything (*) to a new control (TStringGrid).

10. Arrange the TStringGrid on the form and run the application to see the restaurants data.