[Table Viewer] Allow for opening SAS Table Viewer on .sas7bdat selected in VSCode Folders panel

[nrineausanofi]

Hello,

I would like to know if it's possible to visualize a SAS7BDAT dataset within Visual Studio Code using the SAS extension and SAS Viya. If this feature is already available, could you please guide me on how to enable it? If not, is this a feature that could be considered for a future update of the extension?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Plugin versio: v1.5.0-sanofi
SASVAYA: Long-Term Support 2024.03

[snlwih]

Hi Nicolas,
Currently the Table Viewer can only be opened against tables shown in the Libraries panel shown inside the SAS extension. When I remember the discussion from before my long vacation correctly, you have dragged and dropped a VCode Folders panel "inside the SAS extension panel showing SAS Explorer tree and the SAS Libraries tree", so it looks similar to this:

When you double click on a .sas7bdat in that VSCode Folders panel, in the generic VSCode on Windows or MacOS use case the SAS extension would then have to upload that file to a temporary location that is mounted on the SAS Viya compute server, so it can be addressed using a libname and then open table viewer on it. Potentially that table could be large, so something that requires further thought on how the user experience should be and what level of control the user should have when they accidently click on a really large table.

When I remember correctly, in your scenario VSCode runs as a webapp, and the VSCode Folders panel has been configured to show a folder structure that is directly available on the SAS Viya Compute Server using the exact same path. Right?
If so, then my thinking is that when you double-click on the .sas7bdat, VSCode would know the fully-specified path, and that fully specified path would be addressable from the SAS Viya Compute Server with the same name. So if a SAS libname already exists with that path, we could open Table Viewer immediately on that libname.tablename. Otherwise, we would have to create a temporary libname to point to that path and then open Table Viewer. But in both approaches we would avoid having to move data. But somehow the SAS extension would need to know that what is shown in the VSCode Folders panel is directly addressable on the SAS Server, so there needs to be a mechanism for the user to convey that info to the SAS extension in order to avoid having to move the data.

Sorry to go into that much level of detail, but would like to understand your specific setup and expectations.

One more question: what is "plugin version: v1.5.0-sanofi"? Did you customize the plugin and if so can you say more about how/what you customized?