Making Data Available

The SAS Design-Time Controls enable you to easily browse and choose from lists of data sets, variables, catalogs, and other types of SAS metadata. The following sections provide details about making data available for SAS Design-Time Controls and the associated security exposure.

Note: The access control information on this page applies to all of the Design-Time Controls except for the MDDB Report Control. Beginning with Release 8.2 of the SAS System, the MDDB Report Control uses the access control features of SAS/EIS software. For general information, see Support for Access Control Features in the MDDB Report Viewer documentation. Detailed information can be found in the SAS OLAP Server Administrator's Guide, Release 8.1.

General Security Information

All of the data that you make available to the Design-Time Controls is available for read access from a user's Web browser. The SAS server components that are installed with the Design-Time Controls serve both the lists of metadata that you see at design time and the HTML output that the user sees at browse time. Because these SAS server components are not restricted to a single data set or catalog at design time, the Web browser user is not restricted to the choices that you made when you constructed the page. If you want to completely avoid the security exposure that is described, then see the section about disabling access.

Experimental Release 1.0 or 1.5 with Version 6 of the SAS System

With Version 6 of the SAS System, data can be made available to the Design-Time Controls at the SAS library level. Place a LIBNAME statement in the permdata.sas file for the Application Server to make a library available to the Design-Time Controls.

Experimental Release 1.0 or 1.5 with Version 8 of the SAS System

With Version 8 of the SAS System, data can be made available to the Design-Time Controls at the SAS library level. You must modify the APPSRV procedure that starts the Application Server.

1. Add ALLOCATE LIBRARY statements for each of the libraries that you want to make available.

2. Then add those librefs to a DATALIBS statement.

Production Release 8.2 and Version 9 with Release 8.2 or Version 9 of the SAS System

Beginning with Release 8.2 of the SAS System, use the AUTHLIB data set to control which SAS library entities are accessible through the Design-Time Controls. To make data available to the Design-Time Controls at the SAS library level

1. Modify the APPSRV procedure that starts the Application Server.

   1. Add ALLOCATE LIBRARY statements for each of the libraries that you want to make available.

   2. Then add those librefs to a DATALIBS statement.

2. Set up the AUTHLIB data set to control access to the libraries. The use of this data set is described in Controlling Access to Data Sources with the AUTHLIB Data Set in the Application Dispatcher documentation.

Disabling Access

If you are using Release 8.2 or later of the SAS System and you want to completely disable the data access that is allowed by the Design-Time Controls, add a record to the AUTHLIB data set that excludes all data. If you are using an earlier SAS release and you want to disable the data access that is allowed via the Design-Time Controls, remove or do not install the SAS server components that come with the Design-Time Controls package.