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.