Viya for Learners new “Docu-Load” now available for SAS Visual Text Analytics documents.

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The SAS Viya for Learners (VFL) environment gives students access to current state-of-the-art analytics from SAS. The purpose of this post is to present a technique for importing a document collection while operating within the available permissions.

Documents for a SAS Visual Text Analytics project are input as rows from a single CAS table at the time project is created. The table is often manually prepared by the analyst, and this was the case for using document collections in VFL.

Until now.

Suppose instead that you accumulated individual documents for a project you need to work on in a folder on your local computer. The documents might be in various file formats such as pdf, word, txt or csv. You can use the approach in this post to let SAS Viya easily combine the folder contents into a single table on your Viya for Learners environment.

Every VFL user has their own CASUSER library. The CASUSER library will be used to stage documents for automatic uploading into a CAS table.

SAS Visual Text Analytics "Docu-Load" process

Procedure for uploading multiple documents on Viya for Learners.

(11/19/2025 version 4: please forward updates to Peter.Christie@sas.com)

Purpose:

Use this 4-step procedure to upload documents from a folder on your local computer and create a table (.sashdat file) in your CASUSER library on VFL to use as input for a new Text Analytics project.

Note: Individual files must be < 100mb to get uploaded in VFL, but the total document collection size can be up to 5G.

Preparation steps:

Start with an empty CASUSER folder. This will prevent unwanted documents from accidentally being included for analysis in your new text analytics project.

1) Backup then remove all existing files from CASUSER

1. Open SAS Studio > Explorer > files > Home
2. Right click Home and select New folder
3. Name the new folder Backup
4. Select all the contents in CASUSER (also under Home) including .txt, .pdf, .csv, .doc files
5. Right click and Move these documents to the Backup folder.

Result: CASUSER is empty. All files have been (temporarily) moved to folder: Backup.

2) Upload new documents into CASUSER

1. Put your assortment of new document types in a folder on your local computer.

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2. Open SAS Studio > files > Home > CASUSER
3. Click the upload arrow
4. Navigate to the folder on your local computer.
5. Single Click the first document, scroll down and shift+click the last document to select them all.
6. Click open.
7. Click Upload to copy the documents into CASUSER.

Result: CASUSER has all the new individual documents.

3) Create a new document collection for your new text analytics project.

1. From the Viya Applications menu, select Manage Data > import > Documents > cas-shared-default > CASUSER > OK

2. Expand the section Step 1 – Directory Import Options on the screen (shown below)
3. Optionally enter the file extensions of the documents in the Filter file extensions area (txt, pdf, doc, etc.) to restrict the type of documents to upload.
4. The output location must be your CASUSER library
5. Enter a name such as AgDocs and click the Import item button.

6. Open SAS Model Studio and create a new Visual Text Analytics project using the AgDocs document collection. (AgDocs.sashdat in your CASUSER library)

4) Post-processing

After creating the AgDocs document collection, you can 'clean up' and delete all individual document files that were copied into your CASUSER folder except for the AgDocs.sashdat table. You can now move everything from the backup folder location (Step1) back to CASUSER.

Result: CASUSER contains everything it had before, plus an additional AgDocs table.

NOTE 1: This technique will process all documents in CASUSER at the time you run the import. Prior to doing the import, make sure to move or delete any unwanted files from CASUSER that you do not want in the new document collection. Also note that SAS datasets or SAS programs that are in CASUSER at the time of import will not be uploaded.

NOTE 2: The .sashdat table that is created after you upload the documents will remain in Viya until you delete it. It is ok to delete the original documents from CASUSER after the upload completes successfully, but do not delete the new sashdat table that was created in section 3.

NOTE 3: you can select the file type(s) at upload time. For example, if you have “pdf” and “txt” files in CASUSER but only need the “txt” files for your VTA project, you do not have to remove the pdf files from CASUSER. Just make sure you specify the filetype “txt” in step 3 under Create a new document collection before you run the upload.

NOTE 4: for document collections that are already in a SAS dataset or in a single csv file, use the Manage Data application to upload the file.

I want to extend a special thanks to everyone at North Carolina A&T State University who tested this process! I hope it helps you to conveniently add document collections for analysis in your Text Analytics projects.

Thanks for reading!

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