Best approach Viya 4 regarding Data entry through report user activity in Visual Analytics

[acordes]

Hi @XavierBizoux, yesterday I came across once again your fantastic quiz blog series. https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Data-Entry-in-SAS-Visual-Analytics-8-3-Part-3... 

Back again in 2021 I could re-built this solution to my needs in my SAS Viya environment.

Now some years and releases later, meanwhile I'm working on Viya 4, the need arises to let the report user interact with the report, mainly giving him the functionality to add comments and save them to the underlying sashdat files. 

Would you still recommend using the tools and techniques described in the quiz blog series?

[XavierBizoux · Accepted solution]

Hi @acordes, the approach is still relevant in Viya 4. You should nevertheless think about the concurrency when multiple users update CAS tables, there is always a risk to interact with the same record. If you are just appending data to the CAS table, that should not be an issue. If you want to edit the table, you might have a look at the new edit functionality (https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/vacdc/v_031/vavwr/p14ocrbg8jvjzon18j8tv6wfl48h.htm). Another option might also be to use SingleStore to host the data. You can then interact directly with SingleStore from a web application and due to the way CAS and SingleStore interact, the new data will automatically be available to the report as the CAS server will retrieve "live data" from SingleStore. 

Let me know if you have questions. 

[acordes]

Thank you very much @XavierBizoux .

Perhaps the new edit data source functionality might suffice. Do you know if through these access controls I achieve limiting the scope of editable cells?

proc cas;
accessControl.updSomeAcsColumn /
   acs={  
     {caslib="LAB",
      table="CARS.sashdat",
      column="invoice",
      identity="*",
      identityType="Group",
      permType="Grant",
      permission="MANAGEACCESS"}};
run;

[XavierBizoux]

Hi Arne, 

It took me quite sometime to get back to you as I tested on my environment and I had to check with Product Management before I could provide a complete answer. 

Currently, Row-Level Security and Column-Level Security are not supported when editing data in SAS Visual Analytics. These features are on the to-do list for R&D and they will be targeted for next year. For the time being, the documentation warns about the following: If the source table contains any data that you are not authorized to view, then that data will be excluded when you save the table.

https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/vacdc/v_030/vareportdata/n0hk5nlzlwj7don19ziq4946pwdn.htm#p1...

If you want to edit the table content and only allow to update specific columns, you can achieve this using jobs or REST APIs. This means that you should create your own user interface and rely on SAS code or REST APIs to update the CAS table. 

Please let me know if you have questions. 

Regards, 

Xavier