SAS Viya 2021.1.3 (July 2021) – Custom Step New Features
The SAS Viya 2021.1.3 stable release (July 2021) delivered some new features for Custom Steps in SAS Studio Flow. In previous articles I introduced Custom Steps and reviewed the concept of dependent controls. In this article, I will discuss the new Custom Step Designer, how you can share custom steps, and a few other new features.
Custom Step Designer
The Designer is a visual interface to help you quickly build the JSON for the user interface. This JSON is visible on the Prompt UI tab. In the Designer you can add pages and controls and set their properties.
Below is a slide of the components of the new Custom Step Designer.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
The Control library is where you can add pages and drag controls from the library to the page design area.
You then can set properties for the selected control. Each control has a different set of properties that corresponds to its JSON properties. For example, the Text Field control has the following properties:
In the Page Design area, when you select a control there are buttons to delete the control and move to it up or down on the page.
Also, in the Page Design area, you can right-click a control to view a menu for additional options such as duplicating the control, moving it to a section or to another page.
Download/Upload Custom Steps
To aid in the sharing of custom steps, you can now download and upload .step files from the SAS Studio Explorer pane.
To download a custom step highlight it in the SAS Studio Explorer pane, then right-click and select Download file.
To upload step files, select the folder you want to upload them to in the SAS Studio Explorer pane, then right-click and select Upload files.
You are then prompted to select the file(s) to upload.
Add Custom Step to Favorites
You can now add a Custom Step to your My Favorites folder by right-clicking it on either the Steps or Explorer pane and select Add to My Favorites.
View Custom Step File as Text
Custom steps now can be viewed as a text file. Select the custom step in the SAS Studio Explorer pane, then right-click and select View file as text.
Below is an example of what the text file looks like.
Summary
For more information on these newly available features for custom steps in the 2021.1.3 (July 2021) stable release, review its What's New documentation.
