From articles I've read on the web, it is clear that data is gold in the twenty-first century. Loading, enriching, manipulating and analyzing data is something in which SAS excels. Based on questions from colleagues and customers, it is clear end-users are willing to display data handled by SAS outside of the user interfaces bundled with the SAS software.
I recently completed a series of articles on the SAS Community library where I shed some light on different techniques for feeding web applications with SAS data stored in SAS Viya environment. The series includes a discussion of options for extracting data, building a React application, how to build web applications using SAS Viya, SAS Cloud Analytic Service (CAS), SAS Compute Server, and SAS Micro Analytic Service (MAS).
I demonstrate the functionality and discuss project details in the video Develop Web Application to Extract SAS Data, found on the SAS Users YouTube Channel.
I'm tying everything together in this post as a reference point. I'll provide a link to each article along with a brief description. The Community articles have all the detailed steps for developing the application. I'm excited bring you this information, so let's get started.
Part 1 - Develop web applications series: Options for extracting data
In this first article, I explain when to use SAS Micro Analytic Service, SAS Viya Jobs, SAS Cloud Analytic Service, and SAS Compute Server.
Part 2 - Develop web applications series: Creating the React based application
To demonstrate the different options, in the second article, I create a simple web application using React JavaScript library. The application also handles authentication against SAS Viya. The application is structured in such a way to avoid redundant code and each component has a well-defined role. From here, we can build the different pages to access CAS, MAS, Compute Server or SAS Viya Jobs.
The image below offers a view of the application which starts in Part 2 and continues throughout the series..
Part 3 - Develop web applications series: Build a web application using SAS Viya Jobs
In this article, I drive you through the steps to retrieve data from the SAS environment using SAS Viya Jobs. We build out the Jobs tab and on the page, display two dropdown boxes to select a library and table. The final piece is a submit button to retrieve the data to populate a table.
Part 4 - Develop web applications series: Build a web application using SAS Cloud Analytic Service
In article number 4, we go through the steps to build a page similar to the one in the previous article, but this time the data comes directly from the SAS Cloud Analytic Service (CAS). We reuse the application structure which was created in Part 2. We focus on the CAS tab. As for the SAS Viya Jobs, we display two dropdown boxes to select a library and table. We finish again with a submit button to retrieve the data to populate a table.
Part 5 - Develop web applications series: Build a web application using SAS Compute Server
In the next article, we go through the steps to build a page similar to the ones from previous articles, but this time the data comes directly from the SAS Compute Server. We reuse the application structure created in this Part 2 article. The remainder of the article focuses on the Compute tab. As for the CAS content, we display two dropdown boxes to select a library and table. Finishing off again with the submit button to retrieve the data to populate a table.
Part 6 - Develop web applications series: Build a web application using SAS Micro Analytic Service
For the final article, you discover how to build a page to access data from the SAS Micro Analytic Service. We reuse the same basic web application built in Part 2. However, this time it will require a bit more preparation work as the SAS Micro Analytic Service (MAS) is designed for model scoring.
Bonus Material - SAS Authentication for ReactJS based applications
In this addendum to the series, I outline the authorization code OAuth flow. This is the recommended means of authenticating to SAS Viya and I provide technical background and detailed code.
Conclusion
If you followed along with the different articles in this series, you should now have a fully functional web application for accessing different data source types from SAS Viya. This application is not for use as-is in production. You should, for example add functionality to handle token expiration. You can of course tweak the interface to get the look and feel you prefer.
See all of my SAS Communities articles here.
