Reading from Shared Network Drive

[PDempsey]

Hi all, I would be very grateful if soneone could explain to me in laymans language how I go about reading from files on a shared network drive. As far as I can tell it seems I need to reconfigure my user details within alteryx in order to enable connecting to local shared deives? Detailed steps would be appreciated. Essentially I need my WF to look at a table on a shared drive and pull the necessary data into the WF. The table itself will be static on this drive and will not be dropped into the workflow as an input file at any stage. Thanks in advance.

[cjaneczko]

Are you the only one accessing the workflow or are other people? There are a few ways to do it. In the Input Tool you can use the entire network path which usually starts with \\<Network location>\<Folder>\<Subfolder>....etc. Or you can map that network location to a drive letter, example would be mapping it to K:\. If you map it to a drive letter though, other users may have issues running the workflow unless their drives are mapped to the same letter, or you use relative file paths in the input tool. 

[Felipe_Ribeir0]

Hi @PDempsey 

The workflow will use the permissions of the user that is running Alteryx.

So, if your user has access to the network folder that contains the file, just open Alteryx and try to connect the input tool to the file.

[jpaplanus · Accepted solution]

If you need your workflow to read this table then your only choice is for it to be a input within the workflow at some point. With this you have two options:

1. If it is truly static and will never change, the simplest way would be to use the Text Input tool and build out the table within this tool. With this option you won't have to also configure the workflow to prompt the user for their credentials, nor would you have to ensure that the user has access to the shared drive in question.

2. If the table is not truly static and would need to be updated from time to time, then the other option is to go ahead and use the shared drive and then build out the workflow to connect to this, and then also set the Workflow Options when saving to the server to prompt the user for their credentials (assuming they have access to the shared drive location). When using this table read option you would want to use a regular input tool, navigate to the folder and document and select it. I presume that your computer works like mine where in place of the document server and primary folder name it will put the drive letter, i.e. I:\Process Automation\Table Source Files\Static Table.xlsx. Once you finish selecting your file, just go to the Tool Configuration window and replace the drive letter with the full path of the server, i.e. \\ServerName\Primary Folder\Process Automation\Table Source Files\Static Table.xlsx. The need for doing this is that once you load it onto the Alteryx server it will properly connect to the file as opposed to trying to use your drive letter mapping. 

When you go to save the file to the Alteryx server, just make sure you set the workflow credentials to prompt the user to input their own. Alternatively, you could just have it use yours every time, but then you would have to update the workflow every time you change your password. 

A side note to option 1: if the data is mostly static but maybe updated once a year, or very infrequently, you could stick with the text input tool and just update it anytime the table data needed to be changed. I would only do this if the data changes are infrequent.