Blogging about all things SAS

We are doing some work to enable Channels and WRS report scheduling in our SAS 9.1.3 environment.

Its a complete mare!

One of the issues we have struck is the inability to delete any packages you have published to a channel.  They just stay there forever.

In SAS 9.2 you get a utility that lets you delete these packages:

SAS 9.2 Using the Package Clean-Up Utility to Remove Packages

Luckily the friendly chaps at SAS tech Support mentioned that there is a SAS Toolpool entry for 9.1.3 that does teh same function.

So if you need to delete Archived Packages in SAS 9.1.3 channels, then as your friendly SAS dude for the toolpool entry.

The place you put your portlet files to automatically deploy them has changed in SAS 9.2.

In SAS 9.1 (windows) you used to place them here:

<sas-install-dir>\Program Files\SAS\Web\Portal2.0.1\DeployedPortlets

In SAS 92 (Windows) you need to place them here:

<sas-config-dir>\Lev1\Web\Applications\SASPortlets4.2\Deployed



I posted earlier about the removal of the Public Kiosk in SAS 9.2 / Portal 4.2.

All the feedback I got stated that they turned off the Public Kiosk in SAS 9.1.3 / Portal 2.x as a matter of course.

Just noticed a SAS Tech support notice “Enabling unchallenged access to content in SAS® Information Delivery Portal 4.2” which outlines how to allow access to the portal without the need to login.

So obviously a few people still wanted it.

Angela’s post on the changes in SAS Portal 4.2 (9.2) called Favorite things about SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 highlights the fact that the public kiosk is no longer available in the 9.2 SAS Portal.

A lot of the customers we have worked with have disabled the Public Kiosk page in 9.1.3

So I am wondering how much of an issue it disappearing is going to be?

So tell me do you use the public kiosk page and do you really need it?

Following my post about SAS and the free sharepoint webparts SAS have posted a blog with a lot of great details here:

http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/103-SAS-Web-Parts-for-Microsoft-Sharepoint.html#extended

Enjoy!

Great post over at BI Keynotes : http://bikeynotes.blogspot.com/2009/04/sas-web-infrastructure-kit.html

Unfortunately it is in French, so care of google translate, here is a repost.

In SAS 9.1, SAS Information Delivery Portal is the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell. The latter is provided with the component SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and specifically the module SAS Integration Technologies. For information, the module SAS Integration Technologies is the technological base of the SAS 9 platform and is delivered with all the packages based on components of the latter (eg, SAS Data Integration Server or SAS BI Server).

Playing the role of technical base, the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell” loads the full functionality offered by the SAS portal. By default, only basic features are active. To “wake up” all the features in sleep provided by the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell,” the components supplied by SAS Web Infrastructure Kit must be added by installing the SAS portal.

Below is a list of functionalities and features of the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell”:

* Support for single sign-on (Single Sign-On or SSO) to other SAS web applications (eg, SAS Web Report Studio or SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java).
* Support only applications stored SAS Portlet Collection Portlet “. For information, the portlet “Collection Portlet” open-ended version supports all BI objects and allows, for example, to list the reports SAS Web Report Studio and opened automatically by redirecting users to SAS Web Report Viewer (viewer reports provided with SAS Information Delivery Portal).
* Only administrators (ie members of the Technical Group “Portal Admins”) can create pages (personal or shared) and access the management application preferences. Therefore, an end user will not be a mere consumer of the information published by the directors.
* Full support of the repository and files WebDAV:
o The portlet “WebDAV Graph Portlet” to create charts from data published in XML format in the WebDAV repository,
o The portlet “WebDAV Content Portlet” to restore files WebDAV within portal pages,
o The portlet “WebDAV Repository Navigator” to explore the contents of WebDAV.

Note: Although the documentation indicates the contrary, it is possible to use WebDAV portlets with a server other than Xythos WebDAV Server WebFile (usually Apache HTTP Server or IBM HTTP Server). To function properly, these portlets need a pre-established connection to the WebDAV repository. For more information, please see the comments associated with this article.

In conclusion, if you have a package of the SAS 9 platform (with the exception of SAS Enterprise BI Server, which already includes SAS Information Delivery Portal), you have the component SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and you can deploy a portal SAS “light “no additional cost. Although limited in terms of features, the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell” allows you to centralize user access to various Web applications from SAS.

For more information on the Web application “SAS Portal Web Application Shell” and the existing differences with SAS Information Delivery Portal, see the section “Introduction to the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit” (available on the website of U.S. support SAS) at the following address: http://support.sas.com/rnd/itech/doc9/portal_ov/index.html.

Had a question on my blog about SAS Web parts that are available for Sharepoint and where to download them or install them from.

While researching the questin (sorry Joseph stil haven’t found them) I found this code in the SAS Paper I referenced:

data sampledata;
do n=1 to 1000;
x=int(ranuni(77777)*7);
y=int(ranuni(77777)*5);
output;
end;
run;

filename out ‘\\mySharePointServer\Shared Documents\ProcFreqExample.html’;

ODS HTML encoding=UTF8 body=out dev=gif;

proc freq data=sampledata;
tables height*weight / chisq;
run;

ODS HTML close;

So effectively you can publish to sharepoint using a simple UNC link.

I know I am going to need this in the future so this blog is a note to self.

Following on from developing our MediaWiki plugin that dynamically exposes SAS Metadata within the Wiki, I have been researching whether we should build a Microsoft Sharepoint Web Part to enable customers to stream SAS Metadata dynamically within Sharepoint.

I came across this paper “Paper 390-2009: Henderson, David; Alexandre, Sean - Integrating SAS® Business Intelligence with Microsoft SharePoint” from SAS Forum 2009, that outlines how SAS provides integrations/web parts for BI Dashboards and Stored processes already.

Cool!

Interesting blog post over at Angela Halls blog called “Removing “User Home” Page from Information Delivery Portal“

It outlines how to remove the hoe page from all users, but I can;t see why it canlt be used to add default pages as well, will have to test that one out.

Struck a frustrating problem the other day where new users were unable to login to the SAS Portal.

When they tried they would get an “incorrect login” error, even though we could login in succesfully to any other windows environment (we are using windows authentication)

So off to the log files we went and we noticed this gem:

   UpdateMetadata return code=807fe8f4....
   DoRequest return code=807fe8f4....
   The user does not have permission to perform this action.

Which according to this SAS Support article:

Usage Note 20381: The login might fail with a permission error

and states that the user does not have writemetadata permission on the Portal Application Tree, which means when they login the Portal cannot create a new folder in the metadata to hold their portal preferences.

Of course I would say that the error message that was displayed to the user was far from helpful, but as I was tightening metadata security before this started appearing then it all makes sense.

Thank SAS for the logs otherwise I think we would be chasing this one for a while.