Upgrading Custom Code Snippets

Hello,

Is there a way to import custom code snippets created in SQL Assistant 3.0? I backed up the data directory, uninstalled 3.0 and installed the 4.0 Beta. I can see the differences in the old and new SqlAssist.sas.

Yes, it is surely possible, but not straight-forward. SqlAssist.sas is basically a text file, although some special symbols can be found in the content. So you can open it in Notepad and use simple copy & paste to bring your old code snippets to the new file. The only trick is to find where to paste them because snippet names could be repeating for different assistance types. I suggest to create some dummy snippet with a unique name. then close SQL Assistant, edit the file, find and replace that unique dummy snippet with the snippets from your old file. After you paste them, you may need to adjust snippet numeric ids to make them unique.

Please make a backup of the .SAS file before editing it, so that if something goes wrong, you can rollback to the current config.

Thanks for the prompt reply! I've already discovered that I need to renumber the snippets. From the design standpoint, can you reserve a range of numbers, say 1000 and up for custom snippets leaving 1 through 999 for the stock snippets? Or maybe even create a flag so that you'd never overwrite non-standard snippets?

There is a better way to do that, but at the moment it cannot be used for old files. SQL Assistant supports automatic .SAS file merge feature. At the moment this works for the same version files only, I mean only for merging v3 files from different directories or builds, or for v4 files only. We are still working on making this function work cross-version. I hope it will be accomplished before v4.0 release.

PS. Here is how the merge is implemented. If you rename some SAS file as .SAS.OLD, copy it to the new installation folder, and then restart SQL Assistant, it should automatically merge both old and new SAS files and load all custom settings and additions. Please don't try to do it now because as I stated above this function doesn't yet support merging v3 and v4 files.