This article applies to FME Server 2015 and previous only. The problem has been addressed in subsequent versions.
Symptom
When requesting data from the Data Download Service or Data Streaming Service via FME Server, the transaction fails even though the workspace ran successfully. The message on the results web page may say:
1) "Output dataset '....zip' does not exist or is not a file."
Or
2) Service fails indicating it can't write to the directory specified by the fanout prefix in the workspace.
Cause
May be caused by a dataset fanout on a writer in the workspace. Since the Service does not know where the data was written when it was fanned out it throws an error.
Resolution
The FME Server needs to write the data to a specific file path for it to be accessible to the Data Download and Data Streaming services. It usually achieves this by replacing the destination dataset path by a predefined service accessible location, but when performing a fanout, the destination dataset is overridden by the Fanout Directory writer parameter and thus the data ends up being not accessible. To work around this situation, the FME Server provides the destination location to the workspace by using the FME_SERVER_DEST_DIR published parameter.
1) In the workspace, create a user parameter for the writer’s Fanout Directory parameter:
2) Ensure that the parameter is published (“Published” check box) and name it FME_SERVER_DEST_DIR:
When the workspace will be run on FME Server this name will be replaced by the destination directory for the service and the fanned out data will still be accessible to the service.
Contributors
