SAS Studio 4.1 for SAS Viya® 3.1 has many configuration settings you can adjust. Some of them can be set in more than one place. In this article, we'll see how to change the root directory users see under the Files folder tree, and do it in such a way that your change is not lost when your Viya deployment and SAS Studio are updated.
SAS Studio 4.1 has a default configuration properties file at /opt/sas/viya/home/SASStudio/war/config/config.properties. In a multi-machine deployment, you'll find this on the Viya host, the one serving SAS Studio, which was in the [sas-viya] host group during deployment.
The picture below shows part of this file, in MobaXterm's build-in text editor:
The webdms.customPathRoot property highlighted in the screenshot above sets the root folder users see when they expand Server Files and Folders > Files (/) in SAS Studio. With no value set for this property, SAS Studio maps the Files root to the filesystem root folder on the Viya server:
With a value set for this property (important: read on before you change it, though!), you can have the Files folder start at another folder in the filesystem, instead of root.
Why might you want to do this? As an administrator, think about what you must do to:
Each of these tasks is easier if user content is in known filesystem location(s). Administrators should constrain their users to allow them to put their content only in those location(s), by configuring SAS Studio, and also through a well-designed filesystem security model.
But you should NOT edit the config.properties file mentioned above to change this setting - or any of the other settings in it. If you did, the next time an administrator runs yum update, either directly or by re-running the SAS Viya deployment playbook, this file is liable to be overwritten with a new default version, and any custom changes you made would be lost.
Instead, to override the value for any of SAS Studio's configuration properties, you should do one of the following three things:
webdms.customPathRoot=/demoHere's what the modified copy of the init_usermods.properties file could look like:
[user@viya-host ~] sudo service sas-viya-sasstudio-default restartChanges made to the init_usermods.properties file are preserved unless you completely uninstall and reinstall your SAS Viya deployment. They override changes made in the init_deployment.properties file in the same directory.
However you make your configuration change to the webdms.customPathRoot configuration setting, here is what the Files structure in SAS Studio should now look like, when it has restarted:
Now, SAS Studio users cannot so easily save files anywhere else on the filesystem, through the visual interface. Making this configuration change does not otherwise prevent users from saving files elsewhere using program statements, which is why managing end user's permissions at the filesystem level is also important.
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