The Metadata Navigator for SAS® is an open source project for revealing information on SAS® Metadata. It is easy to use, easy to deploy, secured by SAS® Authentication, and beautifully illustrates the power of SAS® for Enterprise application development.
This application is useful for Developers and Administrators who need to understand the nuances of, or specifics about, metadata. Being a web app, it is possible to share a link to any object! As can be seen in the SAS code, this tool only READS metadata, it cannot be used to WRITE.
The Metadata Navigator for SAS® is split into three parts:
The left hand bar always displays the full list of metadata types. There is a filter box to quickly select the type you need.
After selecting a type, you are presented with the list of objects for that type. These can be filtered on object Name.
After selecting an individual object, we are in Object View - and can see the object Attributes, Associations, and Properties. This can be viewed in table form, or using a D3 graph (the top tabs let you choose a view of either table, graph, table + graph horizontal split, table + graph vertical split). By clicking on an association, it is possible to 'drill into' then next object (a history is kept of the navigation).
There are five steps to getting the Meta Navigator up and running in your environment:
The latest stable version of Meta Navigator is always available as a github release. If you prefer to build from source, follow the Build Instructions.
Unzip metanavigator.zip and import the import.spk file using SAS Management Console (or batch tools) to a preferred location in metadata. Secure this application by setting an ACT on the parent folder with only ReadMetadata selected and apply it to the parent folder for the appropriate Users/Groups. Take note of the folder root in which these STPs were deployed (it's used in the following configuration step).
Inside the metanavigator folder there is a configuration file called h54sConfig.json. Open this with your favourite text editor and set the metadataRoot value to the SAS metadata location you've created in the previous step.
Copy the entire metanavigator folder (with the modifed h54sConfig.json) to your web server. The relative path for this location would be ../Config/Lev1/Web/WebServer/htdocs within the root SAS installation directory.
Your app is now live! Simply navigate to YOURHOST.DOMAIN:8080/metanavigator (where YOURHOST is the hostname of your SAS Web Server, 8080 is your port, and /metanavigator is the location in which the files were loaded in step 3).
See CONTRIBUTING.md