SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

The current release of SAS Web report Studio (3.1/SAS 9.1) doesn’t allow you to define cascading prompts, by this I mean allowing a user to select a country and then based on the country selected allow them to select a state within that country.

However in a paper presented at SAS Forum 2008 titled SAS Web Report Studio Tips and Techniques (Paper 064-2008 )   there is an innovative way outlined on how you can provide this capability by using linked reports.

The approach they have worked out is to create a report for each level of prompt and link the reports, enabling the user to select the appropriate value on each report (i.e first report they click on country from a list, then second report shows states etc) and then be linked to the next report where they can select the next parameter value, and so on and so on.

Great thinking outside the box!

You may find that over time your SAS Metadata Repository seems to be getting bigger and bigger. The reason for this is that when you deleted an object in the Metadata Repository SAS doesn’t physically delete the object it just marks it ready for deletion.

To remove all the objects that have been flagged for deletion you need to purge the Metadata Repository. According to SAS help Purge:

“permanently removes all metadata items that have been marked for deletion in the selected repository”

You can purge the repository via SAS Management Console:

• Metadata Manager > Active Server
• Right click on the relevant Metadata Repository
• Purge

You must have security rights (authorisation) to pause the server in order to perform this task.

Be careful not to click truncate or format by mistake and of course backup your Metadata Server before performing this task.

Out of interest SAS Help defines formating your Metadata repository as:

“formats the selected repository, which removes all metadata definitions in the repository.”

and truncating as:

“Deletes all of the metadata objects in the selected repository, but does not delete the object containers or remove the repository registration”

hence the warning about ensuring you have backed up and click the correct option.