Cleanup of Personal Task and Project Output Files

[JDMTX]

Working with projects that contain time series data and can be run multiple times during the day or the month until the data is finalized. As such, the personal tasks and project output files should not be persisted in SASUSER once the user closes out of their project. What is the recommended best practice in SAS EG concerning the cleanup of personal task and project output files that are output to SASUSER (Periodic System Delete of SASUSER, Redirect to SASWORK and Treat Similar to Foundation, Etc)? TS759 has an interesting discussion on these topics but does not identify any best practices on the subject.

Many Thanks…

[Doc_Duke]

Revising your process flow to put temporary data in WORK and materials that require persistent storage on an explicitly named LIBNAME is the only way to really tame the beast. E.g. Plan ahead.

Systematic delete of everything in SASUSER is not a best practice because it gets used for so many things, so there may be unintended consequences. However, it is a business decision that may also be appropriate in some cases.

Even though it is the default for much of EGuide, I avoid the use of SASUSER as much as possible. SASUSER is on the workstation and, in my organization, it is not backed up.

[JDMTX]

Thank you for the clarification. Went ahead and changed the default in EG 4.2 so that output data is directed to SASWORK instead of SASUSER. Also, modified the workspace server used by my EG users to centralize the location of SASUSER and SASWORK for all users to a set of central directories on the BI Server.

I definitely see your point about the need for good planning as my users of Desktop SAS/EG created projects that utilized SASUSER instead of SASWORK. It was a bit of a pain to properly convert all the legacy projects over to reference SASWORK. By chance, do you know where the Server Properties - Options screen disappeared to in EG Explorer in EG 4.2?

Included below are the workspace server configuration changes that I made to centralize the lcoation of SASWORK and SASUSER.

/* Setup the default SAS System user work folder */
-WORK "D:\SASEG\!USERNAME\SASWORK"

-norsasuser

/* Setup the default SAS System user work folder */
-SASUSER "D:\SASEG\!USERNAME\SASUSER"

[Adrian_Mc]

We had an issue somewhat similar to yours in that a lot of users had ODS HTML FILE="blah blah blah" statements in EG tasks and code nodes.

Sas tech support said it wasn't possible to do it, but after a lot of experimentation I found it was possible to write a .net program to unzip the EG project file (.egp) and scan through the xml file(s) within it and to replace "blah blah blah" with "abc blah blah".

When the edits are complete, the program zips up the various parts back into a .egp file and the user can continue without even realising the changes have been made. It only worked with certain zip programs though, so I had to test it on my own projects before converting everyone elses.

I guess a similar program could be used to convert SASUSER to SASWORK, just in case you have to do anything like that on a large scale in the future.