Blogging about all things SAS

I needed to install the SAS 9.1.3 Clients into a new Citrix server (yes it is unsupported in 9.1.3 but has worked well for the last 4 years, just don’t ask SAS Tech Support for help of course).

After the installs were all complete and we started migrating users from our old Citrix server, they started complaining of issues with DI Studio.  These included:

- Nodes missing in the Inventory tree

- Options missing in the custom transform / custom code nodes

Adding the following option to the DI Studio ini file fixed both issues:

-DentityExpansionLimit=1000000

No idea why it fixed it and only reference on support.sas.com is a similar setting for Information Map studio here to fix it not being able to open more than 999 objects.

But as always fix it first, question it later.

If you want to use a Information Map as a data source for tasks such as DI Studio Jobs, Stored Processes, or building OLAP cubes, you can create a SAS Library that points to a folder that contains the Information Maps.

Each Information Map then gets treated as a table in the library.

To do this either use the following SAS code:

libname ImapLib sasioime
user=”username”
pw=”password”
metaserver=”servername”
metaport=8561
metarepository=”Foundation”
mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Of course you need to add your on environment settings for the variables.

Or you can create it in metadata by creating a libname with:

• Create a generic libname
• Type =  sasioime
• Options = user=”username” pw=”password” metaserver=”servername” metaport=8561 metarepository=”Foundation” mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Issues to be aware of:

• It is slow as you are going through multiple layers to get to the data (i.e Libname > Infomap > Query and Reporting Services > Libname > Data)
• The user is hard coded for the libname
• If the libname has fields defined with gaps in the names the SAS Libname will not show the column.

I have been doing an install of SAS 9.1.3 clients on a a Citrix server (yes I know it is not supported) and all worked fine with Enterprise Guide etc but all the Java clients wouldn’t run.

Everytime they started up they couldn’t find some path and just gave an error saying path could not be found.

We troubled shooted it to the fact that we had changed the Citrix server layout from the last server and had used different drive mappings.  As part of this we had moved where the SAS Client Metadata Profile settings (.swa files) were stored.

So when SAS Data Integration Studio, Management Console etc started they looked for the .swa files in the location defined on the previous Citrix server (as the Citirix profile travels with the user across servers).

The fix was to edit the app.smc file in the users directory (for us C:\Documents and Settings\~user).  In that file is a line:

WorkspacePath=C:\\Documents and Settings\\~user\\Workspaces

Which defines where the Metadata profile files (.swa) are stored.

the other options (thanks SAS tech Support) is to put the following option on the clients .ini file (i.e C:\Program Files\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.1\sasmc.ini):

-Duser.home=C:\SAS

This will then make all users access the .swa files under a workspace dir under this path.  But of course they all access the same ones, so lock them down so they can’t be changed.

Trick for young players on that one, make sure it is after the “-Dsas.app.class.dirs=” option as if you add it at the end it gets ignored for some reason.

And of course do it for each of the SAS clients.

One of the