Chapter 15: Generating Interactive Metagraphics Output | SAS.GRAPH 9.1 Reference, Volumes I and II

Developing Web Presentations for the Metaview Applet

The JAVAMETA device driver generates graphs that are stored in metagraphics format and displayed by the Metaview Applet to create interactive Web presentations. Most procedures that generate GRSEG catalog entries are also capable of generating metagraphics output. (For a list of these procedures, see Metaview Applet on page 375.) The metacodes that make up the metagraphics format can be stored in metagraphics files, or the metacodes can be embedded directly in the HTML output file. Metacodes are simple ASCII codes that look like the following:

 37  8 106 97 118 97 109 101 116 97 30  0 10  1 13  5   0  0   0 50   8 32  32  32  32 32 32 32 32 51 18 57  46 48  48 46  48 48  77  48  68 48 56 48 49 50 48 48

You can use a GOPTIONS statement with a device type of JAVAMETA to create metacode output from one or more SAS/GRAPH procedures. At run time, HTML code passes the metacodes as a parameter to the Metaview Java applet.

The Metaview applet runs with the Java Virtual Machine that is included with Web browser. Unlike the other SAS/GRAPH applets (such as Graph, Constellation, and Treeview applets) the Metaview applet does not require installation of a Java Plug-in on the client machine.

Interactive features of the Metaview Applet include pan and zoom. Compared to raster images (GIF, JPEG, PNG), the Metaview applet offers faster data tips and the advantage of zooming that increases the graph s resolution rather than degrading it. You can add data tips, specify resource files for language translation, specify background colors and text fonts, and drill down to HTML files, metagraphics files, and sets of metacodes. You can also provide a list of selectable drill-down URLs in the pop-up menu. For information on these enhancements, see Enhancing Web Presentations for the Metaview Applet on page 474.

Two methods for generating Metaview applet presentations are

using ODS with JAVAMETA device driver
using the META2HTM macro.

To see examples of programs that generate a Web presentation for the Metaview Applet, see Sample Programs: Metaview Applet on page 478.