SAS Visual Analytics: managing user permissions

I’ve recently had the opportunity to learn a little more about administering SAS Visual Analytics. The sessions introduced me to two new GUI interfaces that simplify the work for SAS administrators. In my last post, I shared how to load data into memory using the SAS Visual Data Builder .

After building the table, loading into memory and scheduling the query, you will want to work on the user or group permissions for the dataset. You can use the SAS Visual Analytics Administrator for this task.

Accessing the table

To access the SAS Visual Analytics Administrator, return to the SAS Visual Analytics home page by selecting the HOME icon and select Manage Environment from the right hand pane. Your userid must have the appropriate permissions to be able to utilize all of the features I am going to show below:

To view the current permissions on the table, expand the LASR directory tree in the left hand side pane. Double-click on the SampleClaims table that we’ve been using for this discussion. You’ll see the permissions listed by type of access permitted for each user role.

Setting permissions

Defining user groups can be done within SAS Management Console. Once I have my user groups, I can then set permissions within SAS Visual Analytics. In this particular situation, SASUSERS is the collection of all users who have access to SAS. SAS Administrators and SAS System Services are a subset of the SASUSERS group by definition. You may have other groups defined, such as Finance or Marketing. The following tasks can be done on any of your user groups as needed.

I want to give my SASUSERS read permissions, but I don’t want them to delete or overwrite the existing table. When I click on “grant” or “deny”, it becomes an explicit permission. An explicit permission is one that the administrator has expressly set. Implicit or inherited permissions will then be set for the subset of users within SASUSERS (my SAS Administrators and SAS System Services groups).

To change the permission explicitly, I select the icon I wish to change for the user or user group I wish to change.

When I make SASUSERS an explicit Deny for WriteMetadata access, the SAS System Services and SAS Administrators inherit a Deny as shown below. Explicit permissions are denoted by a yellow star.

Since SAS Administrators and SAS System Services should have WriteMetadata access, I will need to go in and give the SAS System Services and SAS Administrators groups an explicit grant.

The same process will need to be repeated for other permissions columns such as Write, Administer, and Delete. All the permissions should look like the table below, with explicit permissions denoted by a yellow star.

Testing the result

Once your query has been scheduled and you’ve set all your user permissions, it’s good practice to create an exploration to determine the table has loaded correctly and to see what end-users will see.

Returning to the Home page, select Create Exploration --> Select a Data Source. Scroll down to your table (here we're testing the SampleClaims table) and select Open.

Take advantage of the auto-charting feature in the SAS Visual Analytics Data Explorer by simply dragging and dropping whatever categories or measures you’d like to view onto the workspace. In this example, I’ve selected the variables Claim Amount and Type of Car, and the auto-charting facility automatically selects a bar chart for me.

I hope this has helped you get up and running with some common administrator tasks within SAS Visual Analytics!

SAS Visual Analytics: managing user permissions was published on SAS Users.