SAS Intelligent Decisioning: Advanced Lists
In SAS Intelligent Decisioning (as of stable 2024.01 or LTS 2024.03), you can create advanced lists and reference them in rule sets. Advanced lists can also be shared among SAS applications and workflows.
An advanced list is a tabular data set that can have multiple keys and values. It enables you to manage tabular data in your environment allowing you to publish and query that data in a low-latency, key-value data store. Advanced lists also provide the ability to protect sensitive data in your lists using data masks. When you mask data in a list, all or a portion of the data values for an entire list column are redacted in the output.
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Advanced lists are stored in Redis. You must provide, configure, and maintain your own Redis instance. For information about configuring Redis for your environment, refer to the List Data Service topic in the SAS Viya: Administration guide. In addition, an administrator must add any users who need to work with advanced lists to the Advanced List Users custom group in SAS Environment Manager.
Creating an Advanced List
To create an advanced list, select New list on the Advanced Lists page within SAS Intelligent Decisioning.
The first step in creating in advanced list is to define its properties. You must enter a name for the advanced list. Optionally, you can also specify a label and description.
Check the box for deploy list on creation if you want the advanced list to be available for use by other SAS applications and workflows upon its creation. If you don’t check this box now, you can deploy the list after creation. Check the box for is immutable to prevent the contents of the list being changed after you add data.
The Products\List Data folder in SAS Content is the default location for storing new advanced lists. If you want to store it in a different location, select the folder icon and navigate to that location.
For the list content, you have the option to define an empty list or import its contents from a CSV file. You also have the option to include an expiry date column for the list items.
Next, review the column names from the imported CSV or if creating the list from scratch, then add the column names for your advanced list. If you are importing the items from a CSV file, the column names are taken from the first row of the file. Confirm you have selected the correct data type for each column. The available data types are string, numeric, datetime, currency, and currency code.
You can also select whether you want to mask the column. When masking a column, you can mask all characters or all but the last four characters. Currently, if you mask the data in a column, then that column cannot be returned in a rule set. Also, do not select to mask any of your key columns.
Finally, select one or more columns to be the key for your advanced list. In other words, what column or columns are used to uniquely identify a row on your advanced list. Select Finish to create your advanced list.
Here is the created advanced list with the data imported from the specified CSV file.
In this case, CLIENT_ID is the key column and EMAIL, PHONE1, and PHONE2 are the value columns. Depending on your privileges, you may be able to view and/or edit the list properties and its items.
The status of a list item can be deployed, developing, or archived. Archived is only a status option if you have set an Expiry column for your advanced list. I select to deploy all rows for my advanced list.
This changes all the list items to the status of deployed. Only deployed items are returned when referencing an advanced list.
Referencing and Advanced List in a Rule Set
Once a list is deployed, you can use an advanced list reference in an assignment or common rule set to retrieve values from the list.
The first step is to select the advanced list you want to reference. Only deployed advanced lists are available for selection here.
Next, select the value columns you want to retrieve. Only the value columns that are not masked are listed here.
Finally, map the input variable or variables to the key column or columns on the advanced list. Select Finish to complete the reference logic for the rule set.
This is what the reference to the advanced list looks like in the rule set.
Below are the results of testing that advanced list reference.
Summary
The advanced lists features enable you to manage tabular data in your environment and query that data in a low-latency, key-value data store. For more information, refer to the SAS Intelligent Decisioning documentation on Managing Advanced Lists.
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