Error translating Alias/Manage Assets

[WU1993]

Hello again,

I have read hours upon hours of community posts with regards to workflow dependencies and translating alias errors. I am still learning best practices with manage workflow assets and how that is impacts our workflow both locally and on our company's gallery. I wish there was one article that had all the answers in one spot! There seems to be too much jumping around.

However, this is my workflow dependencies for an app we are publishing to the our companies gallery. I have made sure that the gallery is referencing a system DSN with the proper SQL Server connection, and that the user who is publishing the app has access to that data. Note: everything runs fine when we work locally and when we package the Data connections to the Gallery.

Questions:

1) Why am I still getting the aka:5b83.... ? Shouldn't this alias be the aka:SQL Server connection name we created in the data connections?

2) How should I appropriately send a workflow to the gallery with an input that is from SQL Server, input from a network drive(AccessDB) and two outputs to Shared Network Drives(Render tool PDF and Excel file?

3) This Link Here talks about the Server needing access to the location of the network drives if I leave the assets "unchecked". What is the best practice for this? We have a large amount of network drives at our organization that are used by different teams. Do we need the Server account to have access to them all?

4) _externals: I understand that if I package assets it will be a static, no updated workflow (So this is not going to be practical at my organization). We need the data recognizing our different environments. The large question is.... how can we have our gallery recognize these data sources without producing alias errors?

I know this is a commonly talked about issue on the community, so I was hoping I could get answers here before reaching out to Alteryx Support.

Thanks for all your time and energy.

Mark

[MichalM]

Hi Mark

When a workflow is executed on the server there are number of things you need to take into account

• The workflow is executed on a different machine hence there needs to be connectivity between this machine and the databases and shared locations the workflow accesses
• The workflow is executed by a different user (most likely a service account) so the user will need to be able to 
  • Resolve the dependencies
    • In case of a shared location it will need to understand what the Y or Z drives are
    • In case of a database, it will need to understand what the Alias you use locally translates into as this is the only information passed within the workflow 
  • Access the data - both shared drives and databases

Now to your questions

1) Why am I still getting the aka:5b83.... ? Shouldn't this alias be the aka:SQL Server connection name we created in the data connections?

This is because the server can't translate the alias you're passing within your workflow into the SQL server hostname it needs to access. There are different ways you can manage DB connections but what's worked for me historically is using consistent Aliases (Connection names) across your organisation for both users and the server environment.

2) How should I appropriately send a workflow to the gallery with an input that is from SQL Server, input from a network drive(AccessDB) and two outputs to Shared Network Drives(Render tool PDF and Excel file?

• SQL Server - see above
• Shared Network Drive - I'd use UNC Path which will be resolved consistently by all systems in your organisation rather than mapping the drive as a letter which can be different on each system

3) This Link Here talks about the Server needing access to the location of the network drives if I leave the assets "unchecked". What is the best practice for this? We have a large amount of network drives at our organization that are used by different teams. Do we need the Server account to have access to them all?

See above

4) _externals: I understand that if I package assets it will be a static, no updated workflow (So this is not going to be practical at my organization). We need the data recognizing our different environments. The large question is.... how can we have our gallery recognize these data sources without producing alias errors?

The externals folders are created should you decide to include the assets (inputs, outputs and macros) when saving your workflow to the Gallery. Referencing them using paths that can be resolved is a much better way of doing it especially if you need to keep the data up to date.

I hope this answers it for you. Let me know if anything's unclear.

Michal