Migrating SAS Studio Flows containing Custom Steps

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Question: Why does my SAS Studio Flow not find the Custom Steps when I move it to a new environment?

Flow does not find Custom Steps if you just download it and move it to a new environment.

Answer: You need to Export and Import via SAS packages both the Flow and the Custom Steps.

Many users think all you need to do to move a SAS Studio Flow containing Custom Steps to a new environment is to just download it and copy it into the new environment (assuming all of the Custom Steps are there in the new environment). Unfortunately this is not the case since SAS Studio has some workings going on under the covers that points the Custom Steps in the Flow to the location in the environment where those Custom Steps are stored. There is no standard location for Custom Steps, and it's not enough to just use the same folder name for the steps across environments.

In order to make the connections work between the Flows and the Custom Steps in the new environment, you need to first Export to a SAS package the Flows and the Custom Steps. You can either use the CLI or the interactive Export and Import utilities to do this. This post will show how to use the interactive utilities. For more info on how to use the CLI for Content Migration check out this YouTube video: SAS Demo | SAS Viya Content Migration Using the sas-viya CLI Transfer Plugin

Exporting

The interactive, point and click, Export utility requires Administrator rights.

You get to it from the SAS Environment Manager app, Manage Environment, and then click the Content icon on the left.

Then you just need to navigate in the SAS Content until you get to the flow, or the folder of flows, that you want to Export.

In the popup you need to give a name for the package file that will be created.

naming the export package

You should also check the "Include dependencies" check box if you are also moving reports as well as flows in a folder. Unfortunately "Include dependencies" only includes dependencies for reports and doesn't include dependencies like Custom Steps for flows.

So you will need to also Export SAS package file(s) for the folder(s) where the Custom Steps are located.

Your exported SAS package files should appear in your download folder on your local machine as .JSON files.

Importing

You can now import those .JSON files into your target environment.

The interactive, point and click, Import utility requires Administrator rights.

You get to it from the SAS Environment Manager app, Manage Environment, then Import icon on the left, and point to the source JSON file to Import. You can Import the Custom Steps file(s) or the Flow file(s) in any order but they need to be imported individually, one at a time.

In the Mapping Tab you can map the Table names and locations that are used by a Flow.

The Preview Tab show the items that will be imported,

Then you just have to hit the "Import" button in the top-right of the window. The items will be imported and the Results pane will show the status of the Import action.

Once you've done the Import of all the Export files that you created for your flow(s) and Custom Step(s), then you should find that your Flow finds the Custom Steps and works as expected.

Of course this assumes that you've successfully migrated your data first.