Chapter 8: TEMPLATE Procedure-Managing Template Stores

Overview: Template Stores

What Is a Template Store?

A template store is an item store which stores definitions that were created by the TEMPLATE procedure. Definitions that SAS provides are in the item store SASHELP.TMPLMST. You can store definitions that you create in any template store where you have write access.

Note: A template store can contain multiple levels known as directories. When you specify a template store in the ODS PATH statement, however, you specify a two-level name that includes a libref and the name of a template store in the SAS data library that the libref references.

Why Use the TEMPLATE Procedure to Manage Template Stores?

You can use the TEMPLATE procedure to manage and navigate the template stores that store the definitions that SAS supplies or that you create. The TEMPLATE procedure enables you to manage the template stores by

• deleting column, header, footer, style, table, or tagset definitions

• listing items in one or more template stores

• viewing the source code of a column, header, footer, style, table, or tagset definition

• testing the most recently created definition.

To navigate your way around the template stores you can

• create links to existing definitions

• specify which locations to write to or read from when you create or use PROC TEMPLATE definitions, and specify the order in which to search for them.

Terminology

For definitions of terms used in this section, see 'Terminology: TEMPLATE Procedure' on page 266.