FME Workbench Losing Connection Storage Access

I suspect its partially due to the AVD not maintaining user data between sessions or a bad encryption key. I bleeive the encryption key for the shared database is based on machine randomness, with AVD you can be logged onto one of many machines.

Its probably a good idea to involve you IT team as they may be able to change settings on the AVD to help resolve this.

We’ve had a similar case a while ago where (personal) connection storage didn’t properly migrate between different virtual machines because of the encryption being hardware-specific. The workaround was to have each user create their own shared storage (and just not share it with anybody else). 

We are having the same problem as well. For us using FME Flow as storage for Connections helped a bit: you only have to restore the FME Flow connection every morning. It’s why we’re going back to an ‘old-fashioned’ VM instead of an AVD…

What I find strange though is that the list of recent workspaces IS saved in between sessions. So I think there’s more to it than AVD not maintaining user data between sessions, I think part of it is as well where that user data is stored, or something like that.

Thanks for the responses! I did talk with IT today and have some additional information/thoughts on this.

In our AVD configuration, we’re all assigned specific, persistent VMs, but the profiles are stored separately and not kept 100% intact between sessions, but generally maintain. So, the “hardware” shouldn’t be contributing here, but it’s pretty clear that the user profile is. Conversely, in our previous Citrix environment, the VMs were pooled and profiles were managed similarly, but we didn’t have these problems. Which leads me to wonder if it’s a combination of a change at FME 2025.x and also our change in VDI.

My best guess at this point is that the exact place where FME is storing this in the user profile is no longer being retained in our AVD configuration, that FME 2025 changes where/how this is stored, or both.

Perhaps someone at Safe will be able to speak to this from a more informed position - I’ll report back any more that I can learn, and will test out using FME Flow for connection storage.

Based on [FME Form 2024.2.] Losing Database- and webconnection on new machines | Community, it seems like the Shared connection storage was working in AVD and OneDrive at 2024.x, but may be a wider problem at 2025.x. It may also come down to details in profile management with AVD/DVI environments.

I will still look at the FME Flow connection storage more closely, but we typically have to connect to Flow using a multi-step MFA process for each Form/Workbench window that we open. I’ll test further; it may be more or less work than reauthorizing the Shared connection store each AVD Windows session.