Ideas for Custom Directory Lookup for Reports

[Djones4822]

We have a number of departments that are less than technical, and during rollout of our reports we found that the users struggled to find the "correct" report containing the info they were afto. While we did our best to organize our folder structure into departmental folders and put descriptive text for report titles, at the end of the day a single "file name" is not enough to describe what is contained in a single report. A common complaint was that it would take multiple opening/closing of reports to find the specific section that they were looking for. Sure, more competent users and some of our "quicker" users got it fast, but it was still a common complaint. 

One thing we thought about was creating a database table that would have descriptions and information for each report. From there we'd load it into LASR and now there would be a report that acts as the central "directory lookup" for all the other reports. 

This isn't a foolproof idea though, and I was hoping the community might have some ideas for overcoming this. 

Does the REST-API allow us to gather file directories? Is it possible to build a platform that sits on top of SAS and allows us to link to reports and dynamically generate directories? 

Am I missing a built in SAS solution that we should be leveraging? 

Not sure how to proceed, hoping for some good ideas.

Thanks!

[Reeza]

I was discussing this recently with colleagues and we ended up using a SharePoint list with links to the report. Every time we create a new report we'll add it to the data products list with a description, some tags regarding subject area/publisher/topic and a link. This will allow us to link to products that are public, SAS VA and other sources as well which is beneficial overall - a one stop shop for data is the plan. And it's less intimidating for a lot of new users who are not familiar with data.

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@Djones4822 wrote:

We have a number of departments that are less than technical, and during rollout of our reports we found that the users struggled to find the "correct" report containing the info they were afto. While we did our best to organize our folder structure into departmental folders and put descriptive text for report titles, at the end of the day a single "file name" is not enough to describe what is contained in a single report. A common complaint was that it would take multiple opening/closing of reports to find the specific section that they were looking for. Sure, more competent users and some of our "quicker" users got it fast, but it was still a common complaint. 

One thing we thought about was creating a database table that would have descriptions and information for each report. From there we'd load it into LASR and now there would be a report that acts as the central "directory lookup" for all the other reports. 

This isn't a foolproof idea though, and I was hoping the community might have some ideas for overcoming this. 

Does the REST-API allow us to gather file directories? Is it possible to build a platform that sits on top of SAS and allows us to link to reports and dynamically generate directories? 

Am I missing a built in SAS solution that we should be leveraging? 

Not sure how to proceed, hoping for some good ideas.

Thanks!

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[Djones4822]

SharePoint works, but we have to use permissions a lot since we deal with sensitive data and our userbase spans the entire organization. One of our big concerns is that with our 50+ reports, we don't want to show reports that the user can't access, and we don't want to give access to what they shouldn't have. Obviously the latter is solved by correct permissions on the reports, but I still don't like the idea that our call center reps might be able to see that there's a report that obviously contains extremely sensitive P.I.I.

I know with the SAS Rest API i can access lots of info about the LASR servers and table statuses. I'm wondering if I can also request folder information or user permissions. From there I could easily build an interface that would dynamically show only the reports they have correct permissions to along with any meta information we might store in a table. 

not sure if that's possible though

[SASKiwi]

Have you looked at the Report Collections groups you can set up on the VA Hub? You can set up quite descriptive collection names that may go some way towards reducing confusion.

[Reeza]

@Djones4822 Maintaining permissions in two places is going to be a pain for sure!