Category: SAS Open Metadata API

Removing Custom Task Capability Metadata

Yesterday I saw a question on the SAS® Communities site from Nick about Registering Custom Tasks and managing the capability metadata that’s used for role based access control on those custom tasks. I found Nick’s question especially interesting because we have some free Metacoda Custom Tasks and those techniques can also be used to control access to them.

Nick had mentioned how he used SAS® Enterprise Guide® to register the capability metadata for some custom tasks, was asking about doing the same for the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and also about how one would go about removing the capability metadata. Chris Hemedinger later replied with a response that I found very useful. There was a link to one of his prior blog posts on the topic (Controlling access to custom tasks in SAS Enterprise Guide – The SAS Dummy) and some information on using RegAddin.exe to get the capability metadata populated for use by the Add-In. Chris also mentioned there was not a way to remove the custom task capability metadata short of the potentially dangerous technique of using the SAS Open Metadata Interface’s DeleteMetadata facility.

Having already registered the custom task metadata myself, I now needed a way to remove it so I could repeat the process for future documentation and testing purposes. I used the DeleteMetadata method. This is the main topic for this blog post and it serves 2 purposes: the first is that I wanted to document how I did it so I could do it again later; the second is that it was an opportunity for me to use the SAS Management Console XML Metadata Interface and capture a few screenshots along the way. I rarely use the SAS Management Console XML Metadata Interface and it’s always a journey of re-discovery every time I do. This time I wanted a permanent memory of the steps so I could refer to them again in future. I also ran into an interesting unknown-public-type issue that initially prevented me from deleting the capability metadata, so I’ll show how I resolved that too. Continue reading “Removing Custom Task Capability Metadata”

MKDIRMD Macro: Creating Tree Folders in Metadata

Update 10Jul2015: After 5 years, the macro discussed in this blog post is now very dated. If you still have SAS 9.1.3 then it should be ok, but for newer versions of SAS software (such as 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4) there are better options provided as standard by SAS Institute:

1) SAS Platform Object Framework MakeFolder Metadata Utility: see my later blog post

2) SAS 9.4 has the Make Folder (sas-make-folder) command line tool documented in the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Third Edition” under “Batch Tools for Metadata Management”.

The source code for the MKDIRMD macro mentioned below has a check for SAS 9.2 at the end, that should include later versions of SAS (if used with later versions of SAS). However, I would strongly recommend using one of the newer supported methods instead (as mentioned above).

The inspiration for this post came from a question at sasprofessionals.net about code to create tree folders in a SAS® metadata repository. It sounded like a good challenge considering that:

  • Creating a Tree object in metadata is relatively straightforward, but finding the correct parent Tree object to associate it with takes more work. You can’t search by the parent folder name in isolation because there might be multiple folders with the same name at different locations in the tree (e.g. there could be 2 folders both named Reports at /ACME/Sales/Data and /ACME/HR/data). The parent folder could be specified by its object id but that’s a bit tedious. A neater method would be to allow the parent path to be specified in absolute terms (e.g. /ACME/HR/Data/) and get the code to walk down the tree to find the correct unique parent Tree object (e.g. Data under HR under ACME).
  • It should be able to create top level folders in the root of the tree as well as folders at lower depths. Top level folders are represented slightly differently in metadata than lower level folders. They don’t have a ParentTree association but are instead associated with a SoftwareComponent.
  • It should fail if a folder with the same name already exists in the parent folder. The metadata API allows you from create duplicate named folders in the same parent folder.
  • It should check all return codes and fail fast – it is being used to update metadata after all.
  • It would be good if it worked in both SAS 9.1 and SAS 9.2

I had some metadata API fun writing a MKDIRMD macro that satisfied all of the above. Here is an example of it being used:
%mkdirmd(name=ACME, parent=/);
%mkdirmd(name=Sales, parent=/ACME/);
%mkdirmd(name=StoredProcesses, parent=/ACME/Sales/);
%mkdirmd(name=Data, parent=/ACME/Sales/);
%mkdirmd(name=HR, parent=/ACME/);
%mkdirmd(name=StoredProcesses, parent=/ACME/HR/);
%mkdirmd(name=Data, parent=/ACME/HR/);

I have uploaded the MKDIRMD.SAS code I wrote so it can be used by anyone that may have a need for it, or by those who might want to review it as an example program that uses the SAS Open Metadata Interface to query and update metadata. It includes examples of XMLSelect filters on both attribute criteria and association paths. I am publishing this code under the GNU LGPL license so it can be freely used. I have tested the code in both SAS 9.1.3 SP4 and SAS 9.2 M3 but it is provided “as-is” and should be used with care.

Be aware that with any code like this, that updates your metadata, it is strongly recommended that you have a recent backup (that is known to work) and test the code in a non-production environment. I prefer testing things like this in a private administrator environment (Lev9) since even development environments should be considered valuable.

Found the SAS® 9.2 Open Metadata Interface documentation

I find myself referring to the SAS® Open Metadata Interface documentation on a very regular basis and have been keenly awaiting the availability of said documentation for SAS 9.2. I have been scanning the SAS 9.2 Product Documentation A-Z Listing every now and then hoping to see it appear one day but so far it has been absent. I just assumed it hadn’t been released yet. Today, however it occurred to me that perhaps I should try using the support.sas.com search facility instead (how come I didn’t think of that before I wondered). Expecting only hits relating to the SAS 9.1.3 docs, I was very pleasantly surprised to find SAS 9.2 Open Metadata Interface links in the results too.

In case anyone else is looking for this documentation, and to help me find it again, here are the relevant documents I found:

SAS® 9.2 Language Interfaces to Metadata
This document does appear in the A-Z index under Base SAS (and has for a while I think). It can be found here:

SAS® 9.2 Open Metadata Interface: Reference and Usage
This document is not yet in the A-Z index but can be found here (as discovered by searching):

SAS® 9.2 Metadata Model: Reference
This document is not yet in the A-Z index but can be found here (as discovered by searching):

SAS® 9.2 Java Metadata Interface (JavaDoc)
This JavaDoc can be found (and has for a while) in the SAS AppDev Studio focus area at http://support.sas.com/rnd/gendoc/bi92/api/metadata/index.html

Now, of course, I am kicking myself wondering how long all of this documentation has actually been available while I have been waiting for it to appear in the A-Z list :) Can’t dwell on that now though – I have lots of reading ahead.

BTW – does anyone know if there is any published documentation for the SAS 9.2 Management Console Plug-in API available yet?

Metadata Reporting with SAS® Software

I was reminded today of the “Metadata reporting with SAS® software” presentation I did at a SNUG meeting way back in Sep 2007. It seems such a long time ago now, but when I read through it again it is still relevant today. The presentation is mainly about the use of PROC METADATA and the SAS XML Libname Engine (SXLE). It also lists a few metadata reports that I have found useful in the past and were done using this METADATA/SXLE technique:

Sample Report: list of objects currently checked-out (locked) by SAS DI Studio users

Sample Report: reverse chronological list of all check-ins performed by SAS DI Studio users, with links to review the jobs and tables associated with each check-in



Sample Report: list of SAS DI Studio jobs that need to be re-deployed for scheduling

Sample Report: comparison of SAS DI Studio jobs from 2 repositories to identify those that need to be promoted

The presentation is available in PDF format as slides-only as well as slides-with-notes that provide a little more information. The slides show code fragments and so here are a couple of complete, albeit basic, examples that can be used as starting points for further work:

  • ProcMetadataSample1.sas: this is a basic example to extract and print user information (id, name, title and email address) for any user whose name begins with ‘Paul’ (using XMLSELECT)
  • ProcMetadataSample2.sas: extract group information only for those groups that have a user member whose user name begins with ‘SAS’ – this is an example of XMLSELECT filtering based on associations

It was around this time that I had the idea to pursue metadata reporting by creating plug-ins for the SAS Management Console using Java. This ultimately resulted in the creation of our Metacoda Security Plug-ins product used to review and report on security metadata.