Publishing Extension Tools
Overview
Extension nodes provide
a mechanism for extending the functionality of SAS Enterprise Miner.
Extension nodes can be developed to perform almost any essential data
mining activity. In SAS Enterprise Miner, the essential data mining
activities are divided into the following five groups: Sample, Explore,
Modify, Model, and Assess (known as SEMMA). Although SAS Enterprise
Miner is designed to satisfy the needs of a diverse audience, extension
nodes provide you a means to develop custom solutions.
The extension node files
must be available to the SAS Server. It is recommended you create
a folder accessible by everyone that will use the extension tool (for
example EMEXT). You must add the XML file to the extension node folder
and create two subdirectories in this folder named
gif16 and gif32 to
hold the 16- and 32-bit icons, respectively.
The SAS code for the
extension node must be available to the SAS server. It is recommended
that you put your code in catalog source entries. The path to the
SAS code is stored in the extensions.xml file. If you add the path
for your EMEXT folder to the SASHELP concatenation in the SAS system
configuration file, then the catalogs in the EMEXT folder will be
found by the server. Since the path to the SAS code is stored in
the extensions.xml file, when creating your own extension node, you
need to edit your extensions.xml file to specify your catalog and
source entry.
An example extension
node (EXT Demo) is part of SAS Enterprise Miner. See the SAS Help
for SAS Enterprise Miner for details about EXT Demo.
Workstation Extension
For Workstation configurations,
if the EMEXT folder is created under User Home on Windows 7 (for example
C:\User\<userid>\EMEXT),
it will be found automatically. For any other location, define a system
environment variable named dminemid.components.extra.dir that
contains the path for the directory that contains the extension xml
file. It can be any directory accessible from the machine.
