David Pascoe-Deslauriers and Philippe Thiboutot-Simard

This is a case study for an application built in Drupal to support Statistics Canada's Real Time Remote Access (RTRA) system.

We'll talk about:

UX design for very complex workflows
Building highly interactive decoupled Drupal Applications with VueJS
Leveraging Drupal 8 and Migrate to build data services
Compiler and programming language design
Statistical programming and SAS
RTRA is a system for external groups to run custom statistical programs against Statcan data with them having access to the data directly and while protecting privacy. However, these programs must be written using a proprietary programming language called SAS, while consult with several pieces of documentation to figure out what data is available and when and what restrictions and features are in-place specifically in the RTRA system. Suffice to say, the barrier to entry for using this system is high.

A long proposed solution was to build a graphical programming system to help new users who may not know SAS write working programs, but this was considered impossible or at least infeasible to actually develop . . .

We built a graphical programming system for people unfamiliar with SAS to write SAS applications in a system that combines program development with the various RTRA and data documentation.

We'll talk about what we developed, how we developed it, and why we made the decisions we did.


If you go to just one talk about SAS programming this year, make it this one.

https://drupalnorth.org/en/session/building-impossible-applications-drupal-and-vuejs