SAS BI Inormation Delivery Portal (Prompt Display Customization)

[dhudson73]

I have a project that requires more input parameters than can fit on the screen. The stored process was created in SAS EG and is linked to a collection portal in SAS BI. The paramteres are displayed vertically and users have to scroll down to input all of the parms. Is there a way to wrap the or customize the parms layout so they will all display on the initial screen?

[boemskats · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of ways, but neither of them are simple. One, is you can create a JSP based custom input form for your Stored Process. This is how you would do it traditionally, but it involves redeployment of the whole stp webapp war file, so is not something I would recommend.

Alternatively, you could create a HTML form that submits the form values to a target stored process. This will give you complete control over the layout. SAS have a very simple example here. You can use a parameter value to decide whether this is the first time the STP was called (in which case output form html) or if it is a subsequent call (the STP calling itself, in which case process inputs).  

How much experience do you have with HTML?

[dhudson73]

Thanks, this is helpful. It pretty much confirms what I was thinking. I had hoped there was a more simplified solution. For now, I'm just going to leave it as is. Hopefully, SAS will provide more customization capability around the front end that can be controlled in the BI environment in future releases.

Thanks for your response.

[Quentin]

I'm in the same boat as you @dhudson73, but unfortunately I don't think SAS is likely to invest in generating prettier front ends for IDP / Stored Process Web App. (I had hoped for a radio button prompt type, but that hope has gone away.)Basically they generate a minimum viable front-end for people who don't want to roll their own HTML. But for people who want something pretty, I think SAS views that as out of their Scope. That is, there are plenty of other places to learn how to make pretty front ends, and plenty of companies with web development solutions. And once you know enough HTML/javascript to roll your own UI, it's mostly trivial to call SAS stored processes in the background. But as a "SAS Developer", the challenge then becomes how much to become a web developer to support your SAS work.