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SOLVED

Directory and Dynamic Input errors stop file Output?

cpituley
8 - Asteroid

Hi Alteryx Community, 

 

I am currently working on a workflow that pulls files from multiple directories, filters for all 2018 files, and then combines the data using dynamic input. The data schema is exactly the same in the files that were generated properly. Unfortunately, due to technology outages there are certain files that are completely blank which gives me the error "The file '' has a different schema than the 1st file in the set". 99 out of 110 files are pulled without error. once I union the data pull from each of the directories together I attempt to make an output file. This does not generate and I do not receive any errors saying something along the lines of the output failing to load. 

 

My assumption is that the error messages encountered by the dynamic input tool are stopping the output from occurring even though there is good data in the files that were pulled successfully. 

1) Can anyone validate this assumption?

2) Does anyone have a work around to have the file output generate despite the errors encountered in the dynamic input tools? 

 

Thank you,

Cameron

2 REPLIES 2
david_fetters
11 - Bolide

To investigate this issue, can you pass the filenames/paths into a batch macro and have the batch macro open the files but instead of outputting the data, run it through the field info tool and append the filename to that.  Then you can have the batch macro output a table of all the meta data for each file.  That can help pinpoint any files with weird schema related issues or files that are entirely blank.

 

Alternatively, if you can live without the dynamic input tool, you can use a batch macro to open each file, verify that the fields are in the right schema, then output the data.  Not sure if it will work with your use case, but i've used that to deal with large numbers of automatically generated files when I didn't feel like sorting through and removing the incorrectly formatted ones.

cpituley
8 - Asteroid

The batch macro was the solution I ended up going with. Thank you David for the two options below. 

 

Kind regards,

Cameron

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