topic Re: Windows users home drives in Administration and Deployment

Windows users home drives

Nigel_Pain — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:00:45 GMT

SAS 9.4M7 on Windows Server 2012R2 and EG 8.3 on Windows 10

Up until recently, all users in our organisation had an H: home drive mapped onto Windows shared drives. We have now replaced these with OneDrive as part of our MS365 rollout. Unfortunately, when the infrastructure folk were removing the H: drive folders they found that some were being recreated with a "My SAS Files" subfolder. I suspected that this was due to SAS assigning SASUSER to this location. The sasv9.cfg had the following lines:

-SET MYSASFILES "?FOLDERID_Documents\My SAS Files\9.4"
-SASUSER "?FOLDERID_Documents\My SAS Files\9.4"

I don't quite understand what sort of reference "?FOLDERID_Documents" is but I guessed it was possibly pointing users to the UNC path of their old home drives. So I changed these lines to refer to locations in the users' profiles:

-SET MYSASFILES "%APPDATA%\My SAS Files\9.4"
-SASUSER "%APPDATA%\My SAS Files\9.4"

However, we are still seeing some of the old home drive locations being recreated. Does anyone have any ideas how this is happening? There are no other references to anything which could be the old home drives in the sasv9.cfg file or the various autoexec files used by Workspace Servers.

Thanks.

Re: Windows users home drives

gwootton — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:00:44 GMT

More information on the ?FOLDERID_Documents variable can be found in the link below. Generally it means to ask windows what the user's Documents directory is and use that, so it sounds like for the users experiencing the behavior, their Windows machine still thinks their home directory is in H:.

Usage Note 50713: The SASUSER default location has changed in the SAS® 9.4 sasv9.cfg file for Windows operating environments
https://support.sas.com/kb/50/713.html

Re: Windows users home drives

sangavis37 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:04:10 GMT

This documentation might be worth checking in your case

https://support.sas.com/kb/50/713.html
Also, if you use SAS Studio, check if you have specified any custom home directory in the option webdms.studioDataParentDirectory= inside ..\SASConfig\<Levn>\Web\WebAppServer\SASServerm_n\sas_webapps\sas.sasstudio.war\config\config.properties

Re: Windows users home drives

Nigel_Pain — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:42:55 GMT

Thanks @gwootton . I reckoned maybe ?FOLDERID_Documents did something like that. But I have replaced it with %appdata% in the sasv9.cfg file so it shouldn't be an issue anymore. We're still seeing the folders being recreated in a few cases.

Actually I have a suspicion that it's nothing to do with SAS itself, but a hang-over in their Windows account profiles. One of them doesn't ever use SAS (might have done in the past though).

Re: Windows users home drives

gwootton — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 19:02:29 GMT

I agree this sounds like a Windows issue.

I would expect %APPDATA% would similarly resolve to the user's home directory, but point to the "AppData" folder there instead of "Documents".

Re: Windows users home drives

Tom — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 19:58:49 GMT

You can easily run SAS code to see where those Windows settings are pointing.

For example make a FILEREF and ask SAS what location it ended up using.

3127  filename where '%APPDATA%' ;
3128  %put %sysfunc(pathname(where));
C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming
3129  filename where '?FOLDERID_Documents' ;
3130  %put %sysfunc(pathname(where));
C:\Users\xxxx\OneDrive - YYYY\Documents

Don't rule out that the users are doing something to create the directories/files.

Re: Windows users home drives

Nigel_Pain — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 12:05:49 GMT

OK, I think I've got to the bottom of it, and it looks like it's the Office Add-In rather than SAS itself. There's an AMO setting "SAS results files location" which looks like it's set by default to a user's home drive. Where AMO was installed before the move to OneDrive that would be the UNC to their H: drive. So any time they opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint it tried to recreate that if it didn't exist.