Wix and InStyler

This isn't a SAS post even though SAS is on the periphery of this one. This post is designed to help other developers in a similar boat if they get a hit on the error message verbiage.

The standard MS Installer is going away (next year, I believe), and a lot of people are converting to WIX (Windows Installer XML). On my latest project, I needed a custom installer. Now anyone who has ever worked with custom installers should be able to tell you what an absolute pain it is, how hard it is to debug, hard to put in custom screens, etc.

This seemed like an opportune time to jump over to WIX, especially when I needed a lot more than what the custom dialogs could provide under the standard Windows installer technology inside of Visual Studios. InstallShield was NOT an option. They want way, way too much money for their product and I am not a fan from days of yore.

WIX is very flexible but it is also hard to work with. There are no GUIs, per se, for it which means a lot of manual coding. My current WIX file, code generated, is weighing in at 900+ lines of XML. That and looking up the GUIDs for products, etc. meant a lot of manual effort and lots of places for mistakes.

I found a product on the web called Instyler Setup. Not sure how well supported it is, and it has a number of bugs, but it mostly writes the WIX for you. Two of the most annoying bugs I wanted to describe so others can seee them on the web:

1. "Error 2834: The next pointers on the dialog ErrorPopup do not form a single loop"

...when running the installer is caused by the text label on the ErrorPopup dialog having a tabstop set to true. MSI is very, very picky about everything which is why it is a nightmare to debug.

2. "Error 1723. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package."

...make sure you reference the CA dll instead of teh normal dll on your custom action.

3. To make working with WIX a lot easier, download and install the DTF package:

http://wix.sourceforge.net/

4. Turn on MSI debugging in your local group policy. this makes like a lot easier to track things down.

I hope these get picked up in the search engines and helps some other dev out at some point.

IIS 7.5 and SAS DCOM: ACCESS DENIED, ACCESS DENIED, ACCESS DENIED

And the joy of being a pathfinder continues ;-]

IIS 7.5 has now changed the game. No longer do we play with NETWORK SERVICES to get SAS operational. Now it is a new user IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool. Security has now been taken from NETWORK SERVICES, which covered the website, to specific security by the AppPools. I am not a security expert but that is my understanding.

So I took my happy little web services project (WCF) that worked fine in Visual Studio 2010 (Cassini), built a Web Setup for it, and deployed it to localhost. Then spent the next 7 hours staring at the same error: ACCESS DENIED. This was occurring on CreateObjectByServer. ACCESS DENIED, ACCESS DENIED, ACCESS DENIED, over and over again. I spent so much time in DCOMCNFG even going so far as to enable the Administrator account as the launching account, open up everything I could, and still ACCESS DENIED.

This morning I spoke to Bubba in SAS Tech Support. Great guy. He didn’t know this area but diligently was tossing out terms on tech notes he saw. He finally tossed out “enable 32-bit apps” and I keyed in on that one immediately. Well, I did a bit of investigation and have now made it far enough along for a blog post:

In IIS 7.5, get your application in place under a Virtual Directory:



Set up whatever app pool you are using. In this case, it is DefaultAppPool. Click on the Application Pools under the directory. Now here is where you have a choice. You can use the DefaultAppPool for everything but that also means giving it access to every library location, file, whatever. I opted to instead set up a new account called ‘WebService”.

Now it needs to be associated with the access rights for each directory and file. This is standard Windows stuff. Click on a directory and add the new username:




In IIS, change the App Pool to use the new identity:




Here are the settings and the ones to be concerned with:




Enable 32-bit applications and set the identity as needed. By default, it will be the name of your app pool. We will use our newly created name of WebService.

Now, time to go into DCOMCNFG (Start --> Run --> DCOMCNFG and fix the DCOM entry for the SAS Workspace:




Finally, change your code to the following:

                ObjectFactory factory = new ObjectFactory();
                ServerDef server = new ServerDef();
                SasWorkSpace = (Workspace)factory.CreateObjectByServer("ws", true, server, "WebService", "MyPassword");
                var id = SasWorkSpace.UniqueIdentifier;
                SasLanguageService = SasWorkSpace.LanguageService;
                keeper = new ObjectKeeper();
                keeper.AddObject(1, "SASServer", SasWorkSpace);

No more ACCESS DENIED.

Thanks Bubba. I think we p*wned it.

…not really but it works good enough for me for now ;-)

SAS StoredProcessService events

If you encounter the following error when using SAS's StoredProcessService events:

event invocation for COM objects requires event to be attributed with DispIdAttribute

Roll your project back from .NET 4.0 to .NET 3.5. This may only be applicable to the web services code.

Example code:

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{

Workspace ws = new Workspace();
SAS.LanguageService ls = ws.LanguageService;
ls.StepError += new CILanguageEvents_StepErrorEventHandler(ls_StepError); <---- ERROR OCCURS HERE
ls.Submit("data test; abort; run;");
}
static void ls_StepError()
{
Console.WriteLine("Bingo!");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}

Flush with excitement...errr, logs

Well, it is Friday night, I am back from the doctor with antibiotics due to a possible spider bite (love those little guys), and I decide to track down some performance issues with the SAS StoredProcessService (or Microsoft's Cassini). Somewhere, someone is responsible. Set up my little test bed to see it all work:


SAS.Workspace ws = new Workspace();
LanguageService ls = ws.LanguageService;
StoredProcessService sp = ls.StoredProcessService;
sp.Repository = @"file:" + @"x:\temp";
sp.Execute("test.sas", string.Empty);


All is well and good. Life is happy, kids are playing, sunshine is everywhere.

Wait! We need to see if the code ran. let's check the log:


string log = ls.FlushLog(1000);

AHHHH!!!! It never comes back. Where is my string!?!?

Turns out that if the FlushLog int amount EXCEEDS the total number of chars in the log, you go to a happy place called infinity. Less than the total chars and all is well.

I decided to test this a few times and was able to get a picture of my CPU utilization:















This does not happen when using the LanguageService directly, only when using the StoredProcessService. Time to wrap up this blog, pull back from the black hole of infinite loops, and go issue a bug report with SAS R&D.

If any SAS R&D folks in this area read this blog, let me know if I missed something. Right now, it seems like I have been bitten twice today by bugs.

3-fer on StoredProcessService

Ok, well the major issues have been tackled except 1. How do you handle spaces in your NameValuePairs? Well, without the single quotes below, it kept splitting the values between the Sample and the Data. The single quotes hold it together.

Check this out:


string[] parms = new string[2]
{
"outdata=WORK.ALAN_20110418_070053",
@"datalib='X:\Data\Prognos\DemandForecasting\Sample Data'",
};


Notice the single quotes around the value? It took a long time to track that one down (thanks ThotWave).

Now it is simple to submit to SAS:


string newParms = string.Empty;
if (parms != null)
{
newParms = String.Join(" ", parms);
}
StoredProcessService sp = Common.SasLanguageService.StoredProcessService;
sp.Repository = storedProcLibrary;
sp.Execute(storedProcedureName, newParms);


I would ask R&D a simple question which is why isn't there an option on the SPS to specify the delimiter or am I missing a flag somewhere?

Our journey with SAS's StoredProcessService object continues...

Check out this code:


string newParms = "outdata=WORK.TEST";
Common.SasLanguageService.Async = true;
StoredProcessService sp = Common.SasLanguageService.StoredProcessService;
sp.Repository = storedProcLibrary;
sp.Execute(storedProcedureName, newParms);

Standard stuff when working with the stored process server through VB or C# (or any other means of hitting these dlls).

Funny thing is the SAS log shows that the macro assignment of newParms never takes place. Hence, &outdata is undefined:

SYMBOLGEN: Macro variable OUTDATA resolves to

Commenting out the Async makes this all work:

SYMBOLGEN: Macro variable OUTDATA resolves to WORK.ALAN_20110418_070053

Now, even wiring up the event handlers for SubmitComplete do not fix the issue. Seems like a bug but I'll let the guys in R&D figure it out. If you have to waste a lot of time on it, however, keep in mind the nuances here until SAS R&D dives in.

Well, back out to the far left field where I hang out. Time to work on the business problem.

This one is a real Keeper

So, if you ever get this error while trying to work with OleDb and SAS IOM:

The object ... could not be found; make sure it was previously added to the object keeper

Make sure that you include the following lines (the lack of a Keeper is what causes this error):

ObjectFactory factory = new ObjectFactory();
ServerDef server = new ServerDef();
Workspace ws = (Workspace)factory.CreateObjectByServer("ws", true, server, "", "");
ObjectKeeper keeper = new ObjectKeeper();
keeper.AddObject(1, "SASServer", ws);

That whole ObjectKeeper is missing from a number of examples that I have seen and it is critical for everything to function. It becomes apparent when trying to get the data from an OleDb DataAdaptor.