I use FME Form in different environments for different purposes - on my local workstation (laptop) and also on our virtual desktop environment (VDI, Citrix, headed toward AVD). It was difficult to work across two distinct environments, first with workspaces, but further related to web and database connections.
We have OneDrive on both, and while it may not be supported or advisable (but I’m interested to hear from Safe and/or from the community on this point), I have had no (known) complications due to using that for my workspaces and connections. If OneDrive is chatty, or you are concerned about locks or other issues, syncing can always be paused while working within Form.
To get the connections working, in Form, I go to Tools, FME Options, Default Paths, and then update the Connection Storage with Database Accessibility: Shared, and set the Database Folder and Shared Key Folder to a location in my OneDrive folder structure. I did this in both environments. If there’s a better way to do this, using Flow or otherwise, I’m interested in that.
Part of the reason for this post is to share an error message that I encountered along the way, which I couldn’t find documented:
Unable to write to encryption key store file 'fme_sharedKey.fmekey', %1 (Code %2)
It took me a while to figure this out, but what happened was that the OneDrive desktop app had silently signed out in the background - while it appeared to be syncing, it was not. In the signed out state, it seemed to set the connection storage as read-only, or otherwise affected it, so that I could not update or use my connections. Once the app was signed back in, it worked well again.
This arrangement allows the use of connections across multiple environments, without needing to export and import or otherwise manually recreate connections.
