title: How can I create an ODBC connection to SAS?
body: <p>I'm writing a program that needs to access SAS data.  I've downloaded the ODBC drivers for SAS and installed them, but I need to be able to create ODBC connections on the fly, programmatically.  The following code (in Python) seems like it should work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import ctypes
  
  ODBC_ADD_DSN = 1        
  
  def add_dsn(name, driver, **kw):
      nul, attrib = chr(0), []
      kw['DSN'] = name
      for attr, val in kw.iteritems():
          attrib.append('%s=%s' % (attr, val))
  
      return ctypes.windll.ODBCCP32.SQLConfigDataSource(0, ODBC_ADD_DSN, driver, nul.join(attrib)) == 1
  
  print add_dsn('SAS Test', 'SAS', description = 'Testing SAS')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it pops up the SAS ODBC configuration dialog, sets the datasource name, and waits for the user to enter the information and dismiss the dialog.  How can I avoid that?</p>