The preferred method
for making user-defined formats available to a SAS Application Server
is to name the format catalog formats.sas7bcat and to place it in SAS-config-dir/Lev1/SASApp/SASEnvironment/SASFormats.
For more information about using user-defined formats, see SAS
Intelligence Platform: Data Administration Guide.
Limitations
The following list identifies
the limitations for using user-defined formats:
If the output library for a prepare
data job is WORK, then format information for the table is lost. This
affects all co-located data providers, regardless of the vendor.
If the output library for a prepare
data job is a Base SAS library, then the format information is preserved
with the table.
For
deployments that use SAS Visual Analytics Hadoop as the co-located data
provider, format information is stored with the table when it is added
to HDFS. This is true only when the output library is a Base SAS library.
For deployments that use a third-party
vendor database as the co-located data provider, format information
is lost when the table is added to the data server.
The Preview Data feature that is
available when you create a prepare data job does not show user-defined
formats.
You can add the format
information back. You can export the code for a load table job and
modify the LASR procedure code to include the format statements.