There was an unknown error executing the application. The engine reported status Error

[jonriddle]

After upgrading our server environment to version 11.7.4.37815, I started getting an error on an application that ran error free for months before the upgrade.  I have it scheduled to run nightly and it fails with the message "There was an unknown error executing the application. The engine reported status Error".  If I re-run it on the server manually, it succeeds.  The workflow pulls data from several different MSSQL tables and writes yxdb's to a local drive.  We do this because the yxdb's perform far better than the SQL servers do.  When it does fail, it seems to leave some of the yxdb's that it is attempting to write in "limbo".  Any other workflows that try to use those "limbo" yxdb's fail with the error "The FileID does not match in the FileHeader".

The error message from the scheduled run don't really point me to anything.  And, re-running the published workflow seems to always work just fine.  Then, any other workflows that use those yxdb's that were getting the "The FileID does not match in the FileHeader" work just fine as well.

Has anyone run up against this before?  Any suggestions on where to look for more information? 

[lepome]

@jonriddle  One thing you might try in the short term is to delete the scheduled job, re-upload the workflow, and then schedule it fresh. 

This seems like it's beyond the scope of Community, so I'd like to work with you on this case directly.  To investigate in detail, it would be helpful to have a copy of your workflow, Engine logs, Service logs, and Gallery logs.  I'll contact you via e-mail to arrange those.

[BradFolger]

Hi - was there ever a resolution to this issue? I ask because we have a workflow scheduled under the Gallery that is experiencing this issue intermittently. It may run successfully 20 or so times, then seemingly randomly, it will "fail" in that we don't see a notification of success, and when I check the schedule in the Gallery, it's still running well beyond the expected run time. I'm talking hours longer than it should, and the job averages a 10 second run time every other time it runs. When I kill the job in the Gallery, I receive the same error as the OP. 

[jonriddle]

I changed two things at the same time and haven't had a problem since.  Not sure which one of them fixed it or if it was a combination of the two. 

1. We're running our instance of the Alteryx Server on a VM.  We were running low of drive space on the drive where Alteryx Server is installed.  So, we had our IT department increase this drive for us by 100Gb over where we currently were.
2. We run a ton of workflows through the night to prep a bunch of data for use during the day.  We store the prepped data as .yxdb's on our Alteryx server.  I think we may have had some contention of trying to write certain yxdb's in one workflow and use in another and both may have been running at the same time.  I rescheduled a couple of our workflows to run later in the morning to avoid possibility of contention.

Ours weren't running any longer than normal though, they would fail within a normal run time.  But, these were some pretty big workflows that would take an hour or more to complete normally.

[jonriddle]

I went back and looked at the change I made to run times.  It wasn't a workflow runtime that I changed, it was the time that we run backups of the server.  To run the backups requires us to stop the Alteryx Service long enough to backup the MongoDB.  This process takes about 10-minutes on our server.  I think our problem was probably due to the workflow running when we stopped the Alteryx Service.

Hope this helps!

[BradFolger]

Thank you, Jon! I am sharing this info with our admins as a potential thing to look at... all the info helps, so I appreciate it!

[venkat_BNP]

Hi - I'm also facing this strange issue with a workflow. I analyzed and figured that this error occurs only when we have output file as "Flat ASCII File (*.Flat)".

This works fine in designer and even in the server designer, but when I upload it into gallery- Validation is passed, when Run gives an error as below

" Oops!

  The job Sample Flat File did not complete successfully and resulted in the following errors:

• There was an unknown error executing the application. The engine reported status Error "

The output flat File is created successfully but the job ends with error - not success status.

I created a simple workflow with a text input and output as .flat file. Still error with run in gallery.

Is the .Flat file not compactable in gallery? Can you help me with this one. Thanks much.

[JosinMC]

Hi,

I was also experiencing this issue with the Run Command tool. I was writing a command to a Flat ASCII file with the Run Command tool.

When running in Alteryx, the flat file was created and the command executed without errors; but in the gallery I was always getting the "There was an unknown error executing the application" error even though the command was being executed successfully.

After reading this reply I changed the Run Command output file type from flat to csv and it started working in the gallery. So I'm also wondering if there's a general issue with flat files in the gallery.

Regards.

[Sri9]

I too get this error.

Is this is solved or some open issue?

I built a Python tool to print directory by passing the input parameters from a CSV file and with a formula tool I made the directory dynamic.

The directory will be printing a list of filenames, fullpath, size.

But I get this error while I run a python tool in gallery. But I got the results fine as expected.

It ran fine for a simple directory path with <10 files. (3 sub directory). But when I ran for heavy directory with 840 files (4 sub directory) I got this error, though I got all the files printed.

Looks like some kind of file locking conflicts / timeout error i guess. I searched in community as well that it is unsolved.

Can you or some Alteryx & Python expert can comment on this?