topic Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them in SAS Enterprise Guide

Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 21:02:00 GMT

We appear to be having some kind of problem with latency and/or project locks. We have noted these issues when 2 users work in the same project:

1. User A doesn't see User B's updates until they log out and log back in.

2. User B's updates are discarded when User A works in the project.

Has anyone seen these issues? Is the solution that we just don't work in the project at the same time? We could make that our policy if we could find a way to get the system to alert us when other people are currently in the project.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

Reeza — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 21:04:19 GMT

Are you using a source control system in addition to EG? Or just 'plain' EG projects?

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 21:10:04 GMT

I don't know what a "source control system" is - I'm just a plain Jane user and have no idea what our contractor might be doing on the back end. Is there a way to find out if something like that is being used?

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

Reeza — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 21:13:04 GMT

You'd know if you were using it 🙂
AFAIK projects are not designed for multiple people to be working on them at the same time, it's kind of like an Excel file. If you had multiple modifying the same thing you run into issues. Unless you have implemented some form of version control system such as GIT that would allow you to version and store your code. But working on the same project between groups is inherently going to cause issues.

I would wait on an official response from SAS in case there are other options in EG that would allow something like this or something in the works 🙂

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 21:19:36 GMT

Thanks! And hopefully we will get that official SAS answer. We can certainly try to avoid being in the same project at the same time if we can figure out how to know when someone else is logged in. Does anyone have a way to quickly check when going into a project to see if someone else is already in it?

BTW, we use a Citrix virtual machine to connect to Enterprise Guide, so I'm not sure if that complicates things.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

TomKari — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:15:47 GMT

When I have a specific Enterprise Guide project open, and I open it a second time, the second instance receives this message. EG is very much intended to be only used by one user at a time.

I'm speculating that something in your Citrix environment is interfering with EG's ability to detect that the project is already open.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

ChrisBrooks — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:16:02 GMT

Firstly I'd agree with @Reeza that EG projects aren't designed to be developed by more than one person at a time and attempting to do so could well be a recioe for chaos. I'm also not sure that version control would solve the problem either. It would certainly be valuable (one of the first questions I ask when starting on a new project is what version control system we can use) but one of the fundamental things it does is attempt to reconcile changes in the files (a process called merging) and I doubt that would work effectively in an EG project as it's not a straight text file.

One thing you might try is having each person work on a discrete portion of the project in a seperate process flow in their own version of the project and then when required manually copy that into the "real" project. It's not perfect and would require real discipline among the developers but it might be the best you can achieve.

There's a blog post showing you how to copy process flows here http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2015/07/08/copy-process-flow-enterprise-guide/

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

LinusH — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 06:32:39 GMT

What kind of processing do those projects perform? If it's data prep and similar you probably need an ETL tool, like Data Integration Studio which has check-out/check-in OOTB.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:18:50 GMT

TomKari, thank you, that is a great hint to what is going on. None of us are seeing the message you pictured which would alert us that someone else is in the project.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:40:42 GMT

LinusH, it's a little importing/cleaning of data but mostly analysis. We have one person creating routines and another checking them and not so much editing as adding comments. Fortunately there are only 3 of us right now so we can verbally check with each other to see who is active, but going forward we'd like a more robust process to prevent accidental overwrites/lost data.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

TomKari — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:35:35 GMT

So I just did a test to confirm my recollection, which is that in Windows if I have two Notepad sessions open on the same dataset, I'll get no notification of a conflict. The last session saved will be the one that ends up on the disk.

This implies that there's no O/S process to serialize program access to files; it must be being done by the program.

My suggestion is redo the test I did with trying to open the same EG project twice on a non-Citrix environment, to ensure that your version of EG is behaving the same, giving the "read only" notification to the second opener. If that's the case, it sounds like your Citrix environment is somehow not providing the EG program with the information that someone has already opened a project. At this point, you should probably report it to SAS Tech Support, as it's not something that anyone on this forum is likely to be able to investigate.

Tom

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:39:55 GMT

ChrisBrooks,

Thank you, I was able to copy a process flow from one project to another successfully for the first time today. (The trick was figuring out how to have two projects open at once and I did this by opening 2 instances of EG.)

I don't think this solves the issue we have today with 2 people working in the same area - we need to have more than 1 in an area since one is reviewing the other's work - but this is definitely a helpful tip for some other uses. For example, we have some user defined formats that we could group in one process flow and share between projects.

Thanks!

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:43:05 GMT

TomKari,

We use SAS exclusively through a Citrix virtual machine and don't have a way to access it otherwise, so we can't do the troubleshooting step you suggest. I think you are probably right that this needs to go to tech support, though, probably to our contractor who provides access to SAS.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:35:20 GMT

We went ahead and reported the issue to our contractor who provides access to SAS (not to SAS). The contractor help desk currently has our request for an alert that someone else is in the project tagged as an "enhancement request." If I'm understanding the previous posts correctly, though, this is something we should be getting with SAS - an error to correct - not an enhancement to request. Right?

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

TomKari — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:56:50 GMT

Based on the test I ran, when you open an EG project that someone else has open you should get a diagnostic response.

I've asked some ex-colleagues to run a test in their server environment, just as a double check. I'll report back when they let me know what happened.

Tom

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:02:17 GMT

TomKari,

Thank you, I appreciate it!

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

TomKari — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 14:34:02 GMT

Sorry, with holidays and all it took a while to get the ducks in a row, but my former colleagues have given this a try and the result was exactly what I expected. In a network environment, if I have an EG project that's on a network drive open, and you try to open it, it will succeed, but you'll get a "this project is open in read-only mode because someone else has it open" message.

Based on that, I believe there's something set up incorrectly in your environment. Your tech support should have a look at it.

Tom

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

brookeewhite1 — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 14:53:28 GMT

Thank you for checking for us! I have opened a ticket and hope to eventually get this resolved.

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

TomKari — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 15:12:20 GMT

Please let us know what the resolution is. I'm sure this will happen to others, and it will be helpful to have it documented here.

Tom

Re: Multiple users not seeing each other's changes or undoing them

CaseySmith — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 15:16:18 GMT

I suspect the difference is the way in which the EG project files are being accessed. If they are accessed through the local file system (which includes UNC paths), there will be a file system write lock on the file, thus additional people who open will only be able to open it "read-only" (what Tom is seeing). Whereas, if the EG projects are accessed through the SAS server (ex. SASApp->Files), there is no file system write lock, so no realization that another user currently has it open. I suspect this latter case is what you are running into. We are working on handling this scenario better in a future release.