Customizing File System Access using SAS Studio on SAS Viya
By default, information that your developers and users create and store in SAS Studio are organized in SAS Content folders. This SAS Content folder structure is not connected to the underlying server file system, but rather is stored in the SAS Infrastructure Data Server. This is a PostgreSQL database that persists content like SAS Programs, reports, authorization rules, models, attachments, and other uploaded files, sometimes even data. This content is shared internally across SAS Viya web applications, so you can find the same content in SAS Studio, SAS Environment Manager, SAS Model Studio, SAS Visual Analytics, and the list goes on. In this blog, I'll show you how to enable the local file system for SAS Studio. For those of you administering SAS Studio, here’s a link to the SAS Studio Administrator’s Guide.
Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
You can view SAS Content by opening SAS Environment Manager and viewing the content page. You’ll see a list of SAS Viya folders. Content within the SAS Infrastructure Data Server is backed up by the included SAS Viya backup processes. When users log in to any SAS application for the first time, a folder is created for them called My Folder. This folder contains items that they do not want to share with other users. The contents of this folder are visible only to individual users and administrative users. There’s also a My Favorites folder, where users can add frequently used reports and data, as well as a My History folder with a reference to the 40 most recent content items that the user accessed. They also have access to other folders such as Public and any other folders that the General Authorization system allows the user to access, based on their group memberships.
The idea behind this allows users to easily store SAS Content in a single location, seamlessly accessible with other SAS Viya applications, and backed up by SAS Viya. However, as they are stored in a database, they are not easily referenced by other non-SAS scripts or programs. What if you were building a SAS program and then wanted to have a 3rd party scheduler or script use it later. Some tools only currently work well when they are stored in SAS Content. But also, items in SAS Content do not have Git support or some other version control that a company might use.
There is a way for administrators to grant access back to the underlying file system on the SAS Server. SAS Studio configuration properties allow for the showServerFiles property to be set to true. When the property is set to true, users can access the file system from SAS Studio.
The administrator has some flexibility in defining the location for SAS Studio users to access. Depending on the configuration, this could expose sensitive information about the environment and allow any user to read files in the shared directory. There are additional configuration properties to define where the file system access begins, in the configuration property named fileNavigationRoot. The configuration property allows the administrator to choose between the following options:
- User – which allows home directory access.
- System – which enables full server access.
- Custom – which uses the configuration value: fileNavigationCustomRootPath
The configuration property named fileNavigationCustomRootPath specifies a custom directory that the administrator wants users to be able to use, like external persistent storage.
Be aware that some customers might lock down and prevent access to the underlying file system. The underlying file system is also not backed up by the SAS Viya default backup, and a system will need to be in place to back up any custom locations where data is being stored.
Additionally, the latest releases of SAS Viya are configured by default to automatically generate UIDs for users when interacting with the mounted file server. To ensure access with the automatically generated ID, see this additional resource SAS Viya 2022.10 UID and GID Changes.
This is all about flexibility—granting your users the ability to choose between saving their programs to SAS Content or on the file system, where they can easily be used and shared outside of the SAS Infrastructure Data Server.
