Jump Start a REST API server for your SAS Viya programs

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Preamble

Hi fellow SAS Viya Programmers - Do you want to enable your users to access your SAS programs using REST API? Do you want to deliver your programs in a container? Then read on!

Introduction

This article presents an easy way for SAS programmers to create a REST API server to front their SAS Viya Programs - including data steps, procedures, CAS Actions or CASL programs.

Full documentation for the create-viya-api tool is located on GitHub. Additionally, please follow this link if you'd like to see the details of the underlying server code. The entire project is based on restaf - An Easy Button To Access SAS Viya Using SAS Viya REST APIs.

Below is a short introductory video demonstrating the functionality.

Key Features

1. Define your API end points using JavaScript

2. Authentication

   • Accepts a valid SAS Viya token
   • If called from an authenticated browser session it will get a token from SAS Viya
   • By design it does not support client credentials(userid, password) - since bullets 1 and 2 are the more common use cases.

3. In your handler (where you process the request), you have access to a context object with the following:

   • The current valid token
   • All the standard http artifacts - path, query, payload, headers etc
   • Access the REST end points via swagger, web applications and any scripting environment

4. Deploy the server in a Docker container

5. The starter example has the following end points to jump start your development. These cover some basic scenarios.

   • CAS actions
   • CASL statements
   • Compute service with the user-supplied code
   • Specific program saved in the "server". In this example, the code is in a file on the API server, but in a real deployment this code will be in some repository

Next Steps

Please try it out for yourself. And be sure to send your feedback - good or bad. 

SAS Documentation

Please refer to the SAS Support site for full documentation.