Administering SAS Home

Introduction

Note: Home page administration is documented in The SAS Visual Analytics Home Page in the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide. As a convenience, documentation for the 7.4 release of the home page is reproduced here.

The home page is a SAS web application that provides integrated access to participating licensed SAS solutions, including SAS Visual Analytics. The home page’s official product and software component names (SAS Visual Analytics Hub and

Visual
                        Analytics Hub

) reflect the original scope of the home page.

Home Page: Roles and Capabilities

Here are the predefined roles for the home page:

Home: Usage

provides non-administrative functionality for the home page. In the standard configuration, the SASUSERS group is a member of this role.

Home: Administration

provides all capabilities for the home page. In the standard configuration, the Visual Analytics Data Administrators group is a member of this role.

Home Page: Capabilities by Role
Capability	Usage Role	Administration Role
Administer Hub
Add and View Comments
Create Collections
Personalization

Here are descriptions of the home page capabilities:

Administer Hub

manage shared content on the home page.

Add and View Comments

add comments, view comments, and edit your own comments.

Note: The home page’s modern presentation mode does not support comments.

Note: To delete comments and edit other users’ comments, you need the capabilities that are listed under SAS Application Infrastructure

Comments. Consider making any users that need these capabilities members of the Comments: Administrator role.

Create Collections

create groups of bookmarks that reference objects. (The Personalization capability is also required.)

Personalization

use individualized features such as settings, favorites, and lists of recent objects.

Note: In the standard configuration, the property sas.home.exclude.capability.users blocks individualized home page capabilities for the service identity that provides guest access (the SAS Anonymous Web User).

Home Page: Configuration Properties

The home page software component (Visual Analytics Hub) is a sibling of the Visual Analytics software component, immediately below SAS Application Infrastructure. This relationship is reflected on the Plug-ins tab in SAS Management Console as follows:

-Application Management
--Configuration Manager
---SAS Application Infrastructure
----Visual Analytics
----Visual Analytics Hub

Configuration properties for the home page include the following:

App.AllowGuest

enables or disables guest access. Valid values are true and false.

sas.home.allow.anonymous.user.personalization

determines whether the service account that supports guest access can modify the home page. Valid values are true and false. The default is false.

Note: This property enables an administrator to temporarily override the capabilities block that the property sas.home.exclude.capability.users implements.

sas.home.exclude.capability.users

blocks individualized home page capabilities for one or more users—regardless of group and role memberships. In the standard configuration, this property is not specified. Set this property only at the direction of SAS Technical Support.

To block the SAS Anonymous Web User (and any other configured anonymous users), leave this property unspecified so that the default value, ANONYMOUS_USER, is in effect.
To block a different user, specify the user ID that is stored for that user in metadata.
To block multiple users, specify a comma-separated list of user IDs.
To unblock all users, leave this property unspecified and set the property sas.home.allow.anonymous.user.personalization to true.

home.ui.mode

enables an administrator to force the use of a particular presentation mode for the home page, regardless of individual user preference settings. In the initial configuration, this property is not specified, so individual user preference settings are effective.

(unspecified)	If the home.ui.mode property is not specified, the modern presentation mode is used, unless a user selects Classic (in his or her Default Appearance setting for the home page) or uses a web browser that does not support the modern presentation mode (for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9).
classic	Forces the use of the Flash presentation mode.
modern	Forces the use of the HTML5 presentation mode unless your web browser does not support that mode.

Note: The modern presentation mode does not support right-to-left (RTL) languages.

Tip

To force the use of a particular presentation mode for the web viewer, set the property vav.ui.mode on the Visual Analytics Viewer software component.

va.supportSharedThumbnails

determines whether the home page displays available thumbnails (specific preview images for reports and explorations).

Note: Thumbnails are available for reports and explorations that were rendered while the va.supportSharedThumbnails property was set to true at the suite-level for SAS Visual Analytics.

Valid values are as follows:

false	No thumbnails are displayed. This is the default value.
true	Any available thumbnails are displayed. In the modern presentation mode, thumbnails are not immediately visible. Instead, thumbnails are displayed on the Preview tab within the object inspector.

CAUTION:

Shared thumbnails reflect the most recently rendered version of an object and are not subject to each requesting user’s data access permissions.

Before you enable shared thumbnails, consider the security implications.

Tip

To make thumbnails available, you must set va.supportSharedThumbnails to true on two separate software components: Visual Analytics Hub and Visual Analytics.

To set configuration properties for the home page:

Open SAS Management Console, and click the Plug-ins tab.
Navigate to Configuration ManagerSAS Application InfrastructureVisual Analytics Hub.
Right-click Visual Analytics Hub, and select Properties.
Make changes on the Advanced tab.
Restart the SAS Web Application Server.

Home Page: Manage Shared Content

Administrators can add, organize, and remove shared content on the home page. For instructions, access the online Help from the home page’s banner or menu bar. For the classic mode, see also About the Classic SAS Visual Analytics Home Page in the SAS Visual Analytics: User’s Guide.

Last updated: December 18, 2018