Overview

SAS Enterprise Guide includes a built-in scheduler. When you schedule a SAS Enterprise Guide project via the SAS Enterprise Guide scheduler, a Visual Basic script is created. This script is executed in accordance with the parameters that are supplied to the Windows Scheduler plug-in. If both the SAS execution server and the SAS Enterprise Guide client reside on a single machine, scheduling a project is straightforward. However, if SAS Enterprise Guide is configured to execute SAS processes on a remote server and the Workspace Server is configured to prompt, additional setup is required to enable the authentication process to complete. If logon credentials for the SAS Metadata Server are not cached on the client side, scheduling of SAS Enterprise Guide projects is not possible.

Configuring SAS Enterprise Guide for Passing Credentials to a Remote Server

This section explains how to configure SAS Enterprise Guide so that it passes your credentials to the remote server when you are not interactively logged on to your client machine.

After you complete Steps 1 and 2, your scheduled projects should run successfully. No additional configuration is required. For information about scheduling projects in SAS Enterprise Guide, see the Help and other documentation that is available within SAS Enterprise Guide.

1. Create the credentials.xml file

Open a Windows Notepad session to create the credentials.xml file. This file stores your server logon credentials that are required for authentication when you run SAS Enterprise Guide in batch mode. The contents of your Notepad file should look similar to the following example.

<xml FileVersion=”4.1”> <credentials> <server name=”SASMain” userid=”your-user-id” password=”your-password”/> <server name=”second-server” userid=”second-id” password=”second-password”/> <server name=”third-server” userid=”third-id” password=”third-password”/> </credentials> </xml>

Notes:

• Do not copy and paste this example to create your file. You must create your own, individual file.
• The previous example is used for an environment with multiple application servers. However, you might have only one server, so your file would contain just one <server> line.
• With SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, 4.3, and 5.1, the first line of the Credentials.xml file reads as <xml FileVersion="4.2">, <xml FileVersion="4.3"> or <xml FileVersion="5.1">

To avoid placing your plain-text password in the XML file, use the PWENCODE procedure to encode your password, as shown here:

proc pwencode in='my-password'; run;

After you encode your password in SAS, add the encoded password to the PASSWORD= paramenter in the XML file.
Once complete place the credentials.xml file in the appropriate directory based on the SAS Enterprise Guide version.
 

Enterprise Guide Version	credentials.xml path
4.1	%appdata%\SAS\Enterprise Guide\4\
4.x	%appdata%\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.x\
5.1	%allusersprofile%\SAS\SharedSettings\5.1\
6.1	%allusersprofile%\SAS\SharedSettings\6.1\
7.1	%appdata%\SAS\SharedSettings\7.1\
8.1	%appdata%\SAS\SharedSettings\8.1\

 

2. Schedule a project in SAS Enterprise Guide

Note: Should your scheduled project fail to execute as a result of an authentication error, a file called credentials.failed.xml is created in the same location as the credentials.xml file. This file maintains a list of all credentials or server IDs that have already failed. This list must be maintained so that SAS Enterprise Guide does not attempt to use the same credentials repeatedly to access a server. With SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, 4.3, and 5.1, the credentials.failed.xml file must be deleted before a connection can successfully be made to the server on which the login failed.