Enabling the VA Feed in Environment Manager Service Architecture

[Nigel_Pain]

SAS 9.4M7 (Windows Svr 2019) on four servers: Metadata, Mid-Tier, Compute (with EV) and Visual Analytics

I'm looking for advice on enabling the VA Feed in Environment Manager Service Architecture. I've been following the documentation here:

SAS Help Center: Feeding Data from the Data Mart into SAS Visual Analytics 

Where it says

If SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Environment Manager are not running on the same machine, you must modify theSAS_Config/Lev1/Web/SASEnvironmentManager/emi-framework//sasev.propertiesfile to identify the target location for the data tables that are to be loaded into SAS Visual Analytics. Modify thevafeed.destDir=property to specify the location on the SAS Environment Manager machine where the data tables should be copied. The target directory that you specify must have a subdirectory named/Formats. You must then move the data tables from the SAS Environment Manager machine to the SAS Visual Analytics machine. You can use techniques such as FTP transfer or NFS mounts to move the data tables.

But it doesn't actually state where these folders should be. The vafeed.destDir property is currently set to "DEFAULT", which is not very helpful. Should this be somewhere within config\Lev1\Web\SASEnvironmentManager\emi-framework? In which case, the data tables presumably then have to be moved from there to the Autoload folder on the VA machine. It's not entirely clear, does this have to be something that I have to configure to happen, with a scheduled job or some such? Or is the default the VA.AutoLoad.Location value specified for the EVDMLA library as configured in the metadata? That's a Windows share so would be accessible from the EV server.

Thanks in advance.

[gwootton · Accepted solution]

Hi Nigel,

I think this section is referencing if the section above it is not true (the VA.AutoLoad.Location is not accessible to the Environment Manager Enablement Kit server machine). i.e. DEFAULT is the VA.AutoLoad.Location.

So if the path specified in the library properties under VA.AutoLoad.Location is not accessible from the SAS Environment Manager Enablement Kit server machine (the one with emi-framework, typically compute), then both of these (vafeed.destdir and AutoLoad.Location) could be changed to an alternate shared path, or if you mounted thee AutoLoad.Location to another path on the emi-framework host and then specify that path in vafeed.destdir, or point vafeed.destdir to some other path and have a regular process move the data to the drop zone.

[Nigel_Pain]

Hi Greg

Thanks very much for this, it confirms what I'd been beginning to think. I had a look at the copy2va macro in the emi-framework and found a bit of code which looked like it looked up the va.autoload.location property in the EVDLM library metadata and used that if "DEFAULT" was set. I have already changed that to a SMB share on the VA server so it looks like we should be good to go. Nice to have it confirmed. I'll see what's happened next week!