Multiple Inheritance Examples in SAS® 9.2

Thanks to Ronan, in his comment on my previous Inheritance Paths post, I now know of an example of multiple inheritance with SAS 9.2 metadata security. As I mentioned in my prior post, the documentation leads you to believe that multiple inheritance, although greatly reduced in SAS 9.2, nevertheless still exists. Unfortunately the documentation does not give any examples.

Ronan pointed out that you can see an example of multiple inheritance in the area of Foundation Services. He explains how to navigate to the example via the SAS Management Console Authorization Manager plug-in. You can also use the Foundation Services Manager too.

Here is a screenshot of the Inheritance tab, in the Advanced Authorization Properties dialog, for the Authentication Service under the Foundation Services Manager plug-in’s Remote Services entry.

Notice how the Authentication Service is inheriting from multiple other ServiceComponent objects as well as the Core folder it is contained in.

I was encouraged to find another example which is shown in this next screenshot.

In this example, under the Table Server Manager plug-in, we can see the DataSourceName object named SharedServices inherits from the ServiceComponent object named SharedServices, as well as the ServerComponent object named SASTS – Table Server.

Of course, these examples of multiple inheritance are unlikely to have any significance to the majority of platform administrators, as they will mostly be securing objects such as folders, that have single inheritance paths. However, considering that the access decision flow still caters for multiple inheritance, and the documentation alludes to the fact there are still some rare objects that do have multiple inheritance, I feel more comfortable having some concrete examples.

Please let me know if you find any other examples.