Next Up: SAS Enterprise Guide Custom Tasks Course in Sydney

I’m on my way back from SAS® Global Forum 2016 (#SASGF), where I heard all about the all new SAS Viya™ platform, and the next exciting thing on my agenda is attending Chris Hemedinger’s course Developing Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide in Sydney on 3-4 May (it’s also on in Melbourne on 5-6 May).

If you’re interested in extending SAS Enterprise Guide to create useful tools for SAS EG users in your organization then you won’t want to miss the opportunity to attend this course. It is written and delivered by the guy that literally wrote the book on SAS EG custom tasks after all!

Custom Tasks BookI first read Chris’ book Custom Tasks for SAS® Enterprise Guide® Using Microsoft .NET back in 2013 and wrote a blog post about it and how I found it useful in building a couple of custom tasks to query metadata: a Metadata Table Finder and Metadata Column Finder. Incidentally Metacoda provides these customs tasks for free if you want to use them with your SAS platform installation.

I’m looking forward to this course to find about more about creating custom tasks, fill in a few blanks, and generally pick Chris’ brains for a couple of days! :)

If you want to find out more about the course, or reserve a place, then I’d suggest you contact SAS Education soon via the contacts details on the course page.

Hope you see you there!

Password Encoding with SAS

Quick note from Paul: I’m really excited that platformadmin.com’s very first guest post is from the well known blogger and author Tricia Aanderud. I suspect you already know Tricia, but just in case you don’t …

Tricia Aanderud, president of And Data, Inc., provides SAS® consulting services to corporations who need assistance understanding how to transform their data into meaningful charts, reports, and dashboards. Tricia has been an enthusiastic SAS user since 2002 and has presented papers at the SAS Global Forum and other industry conferences. She is the co-author of two SAS BI books, “Building Business Intelligence with SAS: Content Development Examples” and “The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes”.

Now over to Tricia …

I frequently find myself querying the metadata to assist with understanding a new customer system or trying to navigate one of my demo systems. As a result, I find I have many utilities that I want to share with customers. However, since these connect to the metadata with an active password, I don’t want to share my password. Using the SAS PWENCODE procedure, I can encode my password in a SAS program and voilà! a way to share the code and shield the password.

Encoding the Password

The PWENCODE procedure allows you to encode passwords that are used in place of plaintext passwords in SAS programs.

The following figure shows the PWENCODE procedure in a simple way. My example password, Pa55w0rd!, is placed in quotes. You can use different encoding methods, which you can read more about in the SAS PWENCODE procedure documentation.

The encoded password appears in the Continue reading “Password Encoding with SAS”