After a package is created,
the transport, or destination, and other properties control how the
package is delivered to the consumer.
Packages can be retrieved
from the following destinations:
For archives, you can use the
stand-alone product
SAS Package Reader to uncompress, or unzip, and use SPK files. SAS Package
Reader can be used to read packages whether or not the consumer has
SAS installed.
Depending on your needs and
on whether you have SAS installed, you can choose from the following
products to access a package on an archive, message queue, or WebDAV-compliant
server:
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The consumer can use
SAS Package Retriever to access a package and to store it elsewhere for continued
use. SAS must be installed in order to use the SAS Package Retriever.
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If SAS is installed, then you can
use the
Publish Package CALL routines in order to write SAS programs, including stored processes,
that create, populate, publish, and retrieve packages. You can also
use the Publish Package CALL routines to publish and retrieve packages
to and from SharePoint.
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If SAS is not installed, then you
can use
third-party client software in order to write a third-party client application that
uses SAS Integration Technologies to access Integrated Object Model
(IOM) servers. The Integrated Object Model provides distributed object
interfaces for conventional SAS features. This enables you to develop
component-based applications that integrate SAS features into the
enterprise application.
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You can also use SAS Information
Delivery Portal to retrieve packages from archives or WebDAV-compliant
servers. For more information, see the product Help.
For more information
about configuring and publishing to an archive, see Persisted Packages.
When the publisher publishes
a package via e-mail, the package is delivered to a list of recipients.
Choosing e-mail gives the publisher authority over who receives the
package. The recipient, however, requires no knowledge about the publishing
environment from which the package was sent, nor must the recipient
subscribe to a delivery channel. Also, recipients do not have to be
SAS users. If the e-mail has a package file attachment, or if the
e-mail contains a link to the persisted WebDAV package, then SAS is
not needed to consume the package. The recipient can use SAS Package
Reader or a Web browser in order to read the package.
Note: There are two methods for
using e-mail to publish packages. The method described in this section
refers to publishing packages explicitly to e-mail addresses. The
other method is to publish a package to a channel, which can have
e-mail subscribers. In that case, the recipient must be subscribed
to a delivery channel.
Although e-mail is
suited for delivering reports and views of data to a limited audience,
a message queue is best used for collecting package data entries for
continued processing and publishing in time-critical environments.
Publishing to a queue, and retrieval from a queue, are entirely independent
activities. The publishing software (programmatic software) and the
retrieval software (SAS Package Retriever or programmatic software)
communicate asynchronously without any knowledge of the location of
the other software, or even whether the other software is running.
Whereas the traditional
transports (archive, channel, e-mail, and message queue) are repositories
for published package data that can be retrieved and reprocessed in
a synchronous fashion, package delivery to SharePoint or to a WebDAV-compliant
server facilitates concurrent access to and update of package data
on the Internet.