Question How can SAS Visual Analytics users change their own passwords?  We are not using LDAP/Active Directory, but "internal" SAS accounts that are managed in the SAS environment.  Answer First, I'll share the simple method: using SAS Personal Login Manager.  If your end users don't have access to that tool, there is another programmatic method that you can set up -- but it's more complicated.   Using SAS Personal Login Manager If you are using internal accounts for your end users (they are all sharing an OS account as the outbound login), they can change their own passwords via SAS Personal Login Manager, usually installed in the end users PCs. This gives them a simplified interface that only changes passwords stored in the SAS metadata repository.                                             Using a SAS program and/or SAS Stored Process I think I've found a solution that allows users to change passwords for internal metadata accounts (@saspw) via web interface. I've searched for an existing SAS tool or utility that could be used, but only found options to change passwords for non-internal accounts. I guess one of the reasons for that, according to Open Metadata Interface: Reference and Usage (page 170), is because "Internal logins are not intended for regular users. They are intended for metadata administrators and some service identities."    Anyway, using the SAS Java Metadata Interface documented in the reference doc mentioned above, I was able to create a Java class “setPasswd” that changes passwords for internal accounts. I have attached the code (.java.txt extension because .java is not considered a valid extension for attachements here), but I have to say that I'm not a Java programmer, and I'm sure this code can be improved, especially as it refers to error handling, constructors, and better structuring the Java class. The API methods I used require administrator privileges, so I've used sasadm@saspw internally. This custom Java class “setPasswd” can be instantiated from a SAS program within a datastep. The SAS code would look something like this (see SAS Language Reference: Concepts for additional information):   data _null_; length rc 8; dcl javaobj j ("setPasswd"); j.callIntMethod("changePasswd", "&_metaperson", "&Passwd1", rc); j.delete(); run;   Observe that this is just part of the code. Another requirement that has been shared in this thread stated that those internals accounts should be set to have their passwords expiring in 30 days or so. If the password expiration option is set, once the password is changed by an administrator, it is automatically flagged as expired to force the user to change it next time he or she logs in. This happens for example if you go to SAS Management Console as an administrator and change the password for someone else's internal account, as well as if you do so through the Java API. In order to reset that flag, you need to execute the sas code below that uses datastep metadata functions to set the attribute PasswordTimestamp (which is zero when the password is expired) with the same value as LoginTimestamp. More information can be found in the SAS Language Interfaces to Metadata:   options metauser="sasadm@saspw" metapass="99999999999999999999999999999999"; data _null_; length rc 8 id $20 type omsUri $256 logints $100; call missing(id, type, logints); omsUri = "omsobj:InternalLogin?InternalLogin[ForIdentity/Person[@Name='&_metaperson.']]"; rc=metadata_resolve(omsUri,type,id); rc=metadata_getattr(omsUri,"LoginTimestamp",logints); rc=metadata_setattr(omsUri,"PasswordTimestamp",logints); run;   I wondered if there was a method in the Java Metadata Interface that could be used to perform this step within the custom Java class and eliminate the need for the SAS code above. What inspired me to go towards this direction was this other Community post by Andreas Menrath regarding CREATE”INTERNAL ACCOUNT – PASSWORD UPDATE” in SAS 9.4.   The final step is to make this code available as a stored process that also streams a HTML form to capture the new password as a parameter to the stored process, that internally becomes the &Passwd1 macro variable. The other macro variable &_metaperson is automatically set by the stored process and contains the userid of the executing user. The following is a simplified version of the HTML interface, featuring only the key components. I have attached the complete stored process code as well:   data _null_; format infile $char256.; input; infile = resolve(_infile_); file _webout; put infile; cards4; <HTML> <HEAD> </HEAD> <BODY> <FORM ACTION="&_URL" METHOD="post"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="_program" VALUE="&_program" /> Changing password for &_metaperson (&_metauser).<br> <br> New Password<br> <INPUT TYPE=PASSWORD NAME="Passwd1" /><br> New Password (validation)<br> <INPUT TYPE=PASSWORD NAME="Passwd2" /><br> <br> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Change Password" /><br> <br> </FORM> </BODY> </HTML> ;;;; run;     To make this stored process available to the end users in a web-based interface, you can embed it as a stored process object in a SAS Visual Analytics report: You will need to set classpath environment variable for the SAS session that runs in the Stored Process Server. This can be done in a few different ways as documented in the SAS Language Reference: Concepts. In this example I’ve added the line below in the stored process <sas_config_dir>\Lev1\SASApp\StoredProcessServer\sasv9_usermods.cfg file. Note that I’ve copied all of the jar files I thought I’d need to my project folder, but you don’t need to do that.   set CLASSPATH=D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\log4j.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.core.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.entities.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.oma.joma.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.oma.joma.rmt.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.oma.omi.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.security.sspi.jar;D:\MyDemo\SetPassword\sas.svc.connection.jar   In order to compile the Java program you will need to use the same version that SAS is currently using. You can find this and additional info by running the following PROC:   PROC javainfo all; run;   As a final disclaimer, I’d like highlight that I have not assessed the potential security breaches that this solution may have. If you decide to implement that in production, especial attention will be needed in order to review and improve security aspects. ... View more

If you came from a SAS programming background, you may have seen the INTNX function that applies basic arithmetic to dates. For example, you can use the function to add or subtract days, weeks, months, quarters, or years to an existing date. By setting the alignment parameter, you can establish if the resulting date will be in the beginning of the period, at the end, middle, or the same as the input date. You can still use this function in expressions in the Data Preparation component of SAS Visual Analytics, but unfortunately this function is not available in Visual Analytics Designer nor Visual Analytics Explorer. If all you need is to compute the first or last day of the current month, or next month, or any number of months in the future, there is a way you can derive that directly in Visual Analytics Designer or Explorer. In order to do that, let’s start by looking at what it takes to calculate the first of the month given any date element. Then we will expand the idea and calculate the last of the given month. Finally, we will generalize the expressions so that you can get those calculations done for any number of months in the future.   First day of the month The calculation of the first of the month is really straight forward. It’s accomplished by using the function DateFromMDY() like the expression in Figure 1 below.   Figure 1 - Expression for First of Month   The DateFromMDY() function has three parameters: month, day, and year, all numeric. For month, we simply use the Month() function, which returns the current month as a number for the given date. Similarly, for the third parameter we use the Year() function, which returns the current date’s year portion. The second parameter is fixed as 1, because we are aiming for the first of the month. The outer DateFromMDY() function reconstructs the date based on its components.   Last day of the month   For last of the month, things are slightly more complex than that, because the last day varies with the month and year, in the case of leap years. The trick is to calculate the first day of the next month and subtract one day.   Let’s start by calculating the first of next month. The next month can be simply obtained by adding 1 to the month number, first parameter in Figure 1. This works for all the months, except for December. We can account for that by using IF-THEN-ELSE logic, where every time the current month is 12 (December), we need to force the month to be 1 (January) and add 1 to the year, instead of just adding 1 to the month, like Figure 2 below:   Figure 2 - Expression for First of Next Month (option using IF-THEN-ELSE logic)   You can certainly use the expression in Figure 2 to obtain the first day of the next month, but this has some limitations that will become clearer at the end of this article, when we will be using parameters to calculate any number of months into the future. We will get back to this at the end and provide an example. For now, I’ll introduce a totally different expression that also calculates the first day of the next month without IF-THEN-ELSE logic. This expression (Figure 3) is a lot more flexible and concise:   Figure 3 - Expression for First of Next Month (preferred option)   The previous expression (Figure 3) introduces some new functions. Let’s take a look at them. The function Mod() returns the remainder from integer division. So the sub expression Month(Date) Mod 12 results in the given Date’s month number if it’s less than 12, or 0 if the month number is 12. If you add 1 to this value, you get the next month number, always. That doesn’t fix the year, though. For year, you can use the function Trunc() that returns the integer part of the parameter. The argument to function Trunc() is Month(Date) / 12, which is always less than 1, except for month of December. So the function Trunc() in Figure 3 returns 1 when the month is December (and that means advancing to the next year), otherwise it returns 0.   Now that you know how to calculate the first day of the next month, let’s subtract one day from that expression and obtain the last day of the month. In order to subtract 1 from a date, you must use the TreatAs() function to interpret the date as a number first, then transform the resulting number back to a date, using the same TreatAs() function, as shown in Figure 4:   Figure 4 - Expression for Last of Month (option leveraging First of Next Month)   The expression in Figure 4 leverages the calculated item First of Next Month that you have just seen in Figure 3, but if you prefer, you can combine them together in one single expression:   Figure 5 - Expression for Last of Month (single expression option)   Now you can parameterize the expressions you have built, so they can return the first or the last day of the current month or any number of months in the future.   Generic expressions for first and last days of current or any month in the future   Supposing that N Month is the name of the numeric parameter that informs the number of months to be added to the given date, where N Month >= 0, you can easily modify the previous expressions by adding the highlighted elements in Figuer 6:   Figure 6 - Expression for First of Month+N   In the expression above (Figure 6), if N Month is 1, all the highlighted elements cancel out and the final expression is equivalent to the one in Figure 3 (first on next month), which makes sense. Similarly, in the expression of Figure 7 below, if N Month is 0 the final expression is the same used in Figure 5 to calculate the last of the given month:   Figure 7 - Expression for Last of Month+N   If you like the option that uses IF-THEN-ELSE logic to calculate the first of the next month (Figure 2), the parameterized expression equivalent to it is found below (Figure 8). As said before, it has a limitation that it only works for parameter values between 0 and 11. In order to make it valid for N Month values greater than 11 you would need to modify the expression and add more logic, which would make the expression more and more complex and difficult to manage.   Figure 8 - Expression for First of Month+N (option using IF-THEN-ELSE logic)   If you understood the steps involved to derive the various expressions so far, the expression for parameterized last day of the month that is based on the expression in Figure 8 above should be straight forward, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for those that prefer the IF-THEN-ELSE method. ... View more