Publishing Extension Tools

Extension nodes provide a mechanism for extending the functionality of SAS Enterprise Miner. Extension nodes can be developed to perform almost any essential data mining activity. In SAS Enterprise Miner, the essential data mining activities are divided into the following five groups: Sample, Explore, Modify, Model, and Assess (known as SEMMA). Although SAS Enterprise Miner is designed to satisfy the needs of a diverse audience, extension nodes provide you a means to develop custom solutions.

Each extension node consists of four files.

The extension node files must be available to the SAS Server. It is recommended you create a folder accessible by everyone that will use the extension tool (for example EMEXT). You must add the XML file to the extension node folder and create two subdirectories in this folder named gif16 and gif32 to hold the 16- and 32-bit icons, respectively.

The SAS code for the extension node must be available to the SAS server. It is recommended that you put your code in catalog source entries. The path to the SAS code is stored in the extensions.xml file. If you add the path for your EMEXT folder to the SASHELP concatenation in the SAS system configuration file, then the catalogs in the EMEXT folder will be found by the server. Because the path to the SAS code is stored in the extensions.xml file, when creating your own extension node, you need to edit your extensions.xml file to specify your catalog and source entry.

An example extension node (EXT Demo) is part of SAS Enterprise Miner. See the SAS Enterprise Miner in-product help for details about the EXT Demo.

For client/server configurations, the four files in the EXT Demo node are

For workstation configurations, the four files in the EXT Demo node are

For Workstation configurations, if the EMEXT folder is created under User Home on Windows 7 (for example C:\User\<userid>\EMEXT), it will be found automatically. For any other location, define a system environment variable named dminemid.components.extra.dir that contains the path for the directory that contains the extension XML file. It can be any directory accessible from the machine.

For a server configuration, specify the location of the extensions folder by adding a definition in the SAS Management Console. To add a definition, follow the steps below.

For more information about the extension tools and the EXT Demo node, see the SAS Enterprise Miner Help documentation.