16.7 Creating a Dialog Box with R

As described earlier in this chapter, SAS/IML Studio provides several simple dialog boxes that you can use to write programs that present options and choices for users of the programs. However, SAS/IML Studio does not provide a toolkit that enables you to design and build arbitrary dialog boxes from within an IMLPlus program. This section describes an advanced topic: how to use R packages to build modal dialog boxes that can be incorporated into IMLPlus programs.

The examples in this section use the tcltk package (Dalgaard 2001), which is distributed with R. The Tcl/Tk toolkit used by the tcltk package is included with the Microsoft Windows versions of R by default. There are other packages that hide some of the low-level details of creating GUI components, but installing these packages can be a complicated undertaking. For example, some R users prefer the gWidgets package, which uses the GTK2 toolkit. However, it is not trivial to install the GTK2 toolkit, so this section uses the tcltk package.