Metacoda Plug-ins Tip: Advanced Expression-Based Filters (ACT Reviewer)

Many of the Metacoda Plug-ins have Filter Bars which provide a way to filter the contents displayed and show an interesting subset. Normally they do simple case-insensitive “contains” filtering on key attributes like name and description (the filter bar label indicates which attributes are used).

Metacoda Plug-ins Filter Bar

Simple text filtering, as described above, is sufficient for many needs. However, for more advanced requirements there is the ability to switch to expression-based filters which are much more flexible. To use expression-based filtering you add a #@ prefix at the beginning of the filter bar field. What follows is then an expression that can use many of the other attributes/columns available in the tables. This expression is written as a Java like expression (BeanShell to be precise) and must resolve to a boolean true/false to determine whether a row should be shown in the table. Any errors in the expression will be shown in a popup error dialog.

This will allow you to do complex expressions like this in the User Reviewer: Continue reading “Metacoda Plug-ins Tip: Advanced Expression-Based Filters (ACT Reviewer)”

Metacoda Plug-ins Tip: Forced Refresh (or not)

This is the first of a series of quick-tip type posts on Metacoda Plug-ins. Most of my previous posts have been relatively long (and less frequent). These quick-tip posts will generally be shorter and hopefully more frequent (time permitting). They will mostly be of use to Metacoda customers and may include links to the appropriate documentation pages (login required). I will the posts with “Metacoda Plug-ins Tip” so you can browse the collection if you want (currently a collection of 1!).

To kick the series off, this post is about the forced-refresh preferences. These are preferences that control whether or not Metacoda Plug-ins will refresh its cache of SAS security metadata prior to exporting HTML, CSV and Security Test XML files. You will find these preferences as check-boxes located in Security Tools Common Preferences available via the Preferences context menu item from right-mouse clicking over most of the Metacoda Plug-ins.

Metacoda Plug-ins Security Tools Node Context Menu Continue reading “Metacoda Plug-ins Tip: Forced Refresh (or not)”

Did I add that CA Certificate to the SAS Trusted CA Bundle?

Sometimes I forget whether I’ve added our internal site root and intermediate CA certificates to the Trusted CA Bundle that SAS® Software applications use. Sometimes I also forget the command I can use to find out whether I did! ;) As is often the case with my blog posts, by jotting things down here, I can find them again either by searching this blog, or more likely, by remembering I wrote it when I see it turn up in Google search results!

If you use site-signed certificates from your own internal CA in your SAS platform installations then you’re probably already familiar with adding them to the Trusted CA Bundle using the SAS Deployment Manager (see the Manage Certificates in the Trusted CA Bundle Using the SAS Deployment Manager section in the Encryption in SAS® 9.4 book for more info).

If you want to find out what CA certificates are already in that bundle you can use the Java keytool command like so:

/opt/sas94m5/sashome/SASPrivateJavaRuntimeEnvironment/9.4/jre/bin/keytool -list -keystore /opt/sas94m5/sashome/SASSecurityCertificateFramework/1.1/cacerts/trustedcerts.jks -storepass changeit

It generates a long list of CA certs, so I pipe it through grep to look for the ones I want:

/opt/sas94m5/sashome/SASPrivateJavaRuntimeEnvironment/9.4/jre/bin/keytool -list -keystore /opt/sas94m5/sashome/SASSecurityCertificateFramework/1.1/cacerts/trustedcerts.jks -storepass changeit | grep -i metacoda

If you want more details on the certificates you can Continue reading “Did I add that CA Certificate to the SAS Trusted CA Bundle?”

SAS Management Console on HiDPI Windows 10

Update 24May2021: see SAS Management Console on HiDPI Windows 10 Revisited

A few days ago I installed SAS Management Console 9.4 M4 and Metacoda Plug-ins 6.0 R4 on a Microsoft Surface Pro running Windows 10. After launching SAS Management Console, and logging in, it looked very odd. All of the icons and text were very close together and the text was hard to read. Here’s a screenshot (the images on this page are automatically resized to fit in the column, but I have kept them at their original resolution so you can click on them if you want to see them full size for comparison) …

SAS Management Console before HiDPI Adjustment

This Surface Pro machine has a HiDPI display with a resolution of 2736×1824 and is scaled by default in Windows 10 at 200%. I assumed that Continue reading “SAS Management Console on HiDPI Windows 10”

Java Look & Feel with SAS Management Console on Linux

As someone who specialises in SAS® metadata security, I spend a lot of time using the Authorization tab in SAS Management Console. I also use Linux a great deal. When I run SAS Management Console on Linux, I’ve noticed that the check box background colours on the Authorization tab don’t render correctly (for me at least). I only ever see white background check boxes when I expect to also see green and gray ones: green indicating an ACT; white indicating an ACE; and gray indicating indirect. These colours are important indicators for the source of access controls so not being able to see them is a problem!

It occurred to me that I might be able to resolve this by specifying a Java System Property in the sasmc.ini file to change the Java Look & Feel.

I first tried changing the default look & feel (using ‑Dswing.defaultlaf) but that didn’t work. What did work is changing the default system look & feel (with ‑Dswing.systemlaf). Continue reading “Java Look & Feel with SAS Management Console on Linux”