Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond

The ODS TRACE Statement

A single SAS procedure can produce a single ODS output object, or it can produce dozens. In order to be able to customize your results, you need to be able to identify these output objects. The output objects from your procedure are what you see in the SAS Results window. ODS provides a statement that generates a description of each output object: the TRACE statement. Here is the syntax for this statement:

ODS TRACE ON;
   *procedures and/or DATA steps go here;
ODS TRACE OFF;

This TRACE statement is used twice, the first time to turn output tracing on, and the second time to turn it off again. What happens in between is that ODS sends information about each output object to the SAS log. To see this statement in action, look ...