description: The Data Controller roadmap is aligned with the needs of our customers - we continue to build and prioritise on Features requested by, and funded by, new and existing customers.
On this page you can find details of the Features that have currently been requested, that we agree would add value to the product, and are therefore in our development roadmap.
Where customers are paying for the new Features (eg with our discounted Developer Days offer), then those Features will always take priority. Where funding is not available, new Features will be addressed during the Bench Time of our developers, and will always be performed after Bug Fixes.
When Excel data arrives in multiple ranges, or individual cells, and the cells vary in terms of their column or row identifier, made more "interesting" with the use of merged cells - a rules engine becomes necessary!
This feature enables the use of "EXCEL MAPS". It will enable multiple tables to be loaded in a single import, and that data can be scattered across multiple sheets / cells / ranges, accessed via the rules described further below.
The backend SAS tables must still exist, but the column names do not need to appear in the excel file.
To drive the behaviour, a new configuration table must be added to the control library - MPE_EXCEL_MAP. The columns are defined as follows:
To illustrate with an example - consider the following excel. The yellow cells need to be imported.
The data will be imported into two SAS tables - the cells on the left will go into a table with multiple rows, and the cells on the right will be entered as a single row. The XLMAP_ID will also be added to both tables, and the tables will need to have had their keys and quality rules defined in Data Controller in the usual way.
To import the excel, the end user simply needs to navigate to the UPLOAD tab, select the appropriate map (eg MAP01), and upload. This will stage two tables (MYLIB.DS1 and MYLIB.DS2) which will go through the usual approval process and quality checks. A copy of the source excel file will be attached to each upload.
|Backend|1|Create services to fetch Excel Maps and rules (only those the user has permissions for), corresponding SASjs tests, and update developer docs|
Previously, if a user filtered on, say, "region", and then filtered on "store", they would see stores for ALL regions (not just the region/regions already selected in the filter).
We added a checkbox to the top left of the filter dialog (default ON) for "Dynamic Where Clause". Whilst enabled, whenever a list of values is requested, it is filtered using every filter clause EXCEPT the one currently being modified.
When editing a value in a grid, the values presented to the user should be filtered according to additional rules, based on the values of other cells in the same row.
The HOOK_SCRIPT can be either a SAS program on a filesystem (identified by a ".sas" extension) or the path to a registered SAS Service (STP or JES). The latter is identified by the absence of an extension.
A new table (MPE_ROW_LEVEL_SECURITY) was added to the data controller library to allow complex rules to be applied based on the SAS group and the target table. Documentation is [here](/row-level-security/)
Data Controller uses an OEM licence with the excellent [sheetJS](https://sheetjs.com/) library. This enables us to read pretty much any version of Excel at breakneck speeds.
By default, Data Controller will use the data model of the target table when extracting data, eg to determine whether a column should be character, numeric, date, datetime or time.
A new table (MPE_EXCEL_CONFIG) was be added to the data controller library to allow the column with the formula to be specified. See [documentation](/excel/)
When importing spreadsheets with ambiguous dates (eg 01/02 or 02/01) the ANYDTDTM. informat was using the locale of the browser (en_us) instead of that of the client's actual country, resulting in incorrect dates being loaded. This is due to the [default behaviour](https://rawsas.com/look-out-locale-gotcha/) of the SAS Stored Process server.
Data Controller relies on metadata permissions (in SAS 9) or authorization rules (in Viya) to determine who can see which table.
We had a customer who was using Data Controller to provide data access to a company wide audience, most of whom did not have access to SAS client tools (such as Enterprise Guide) and so had not been set up in metadata before.
It was necessary to find a way to restrict the tables which certain groups could see, without having to tweak permissions in SAS Management Console.
