SAS Metadata DI Studio - Connection from TransformationStep to Prototype

[ErikLund_Jensen]

Over the last 10 years we have collected a large number of User Transforms, some probably unused today, other obsolete but still used, and many changed without the corresponding jobs being revisited and redeployed. So I need to clean this up and make a sceduled report to help keeping it clean. One can make an impact analysis om a User Transform, but it would be a tedious task as we have 256 User Transforms used in 3842 instances in 2190 DI Studio jobs, so I want to automate it.

I have a partially working solution based on Name and TransformRole/MetadataType, but it doesn't work if somebody has changed the name of the TransformationStep instance. So I try to find the association chain between a User Transformation as Prototype and it's instance as TransformationStep in a job.

It must be there, because otherwise the impact analysis would be impossible. But I cant' find it. So far I am stuck with attributes on the main objects, but no direct associations or associations to intermediate objects that seems to create a link between them.

It can be tricky to unravel if the chain is long (and tricky to write xml and map to extract data as well), but I never encountered a "dead end" before, so any help would be greatly appreciateded!

Thanks

Erik

[ErikLund_Jensen · Accepted solution]

Problem solved thanks to a friend who came to my help and proved the old saying that two heads are better than one, even if one of them belongs to a dentist. Since I didn't get any answers to my post, I wonder if it is highly uncommon to use SAS metadata to this depth for quality assurance procedures.

A User Transformation as Prototype and it's instance as TransformationStep both have associated Class and VERSION property objects. The objects are individual, and both Class properties have an UUID as defaultvalue. My dentist friend instantly recognized the two UUIDs as being identical, which I never thought of. Added benefit: If the VERSION properties aren't identical too, the TransformationStep uses an outdated version of the Prototype and needs to be refreshed.