Option for $(FME_MF_DIR)

I'm not sure this is related to using UNC paths or not. As far as I know, if FME detects a path relative to the location of the workbench file, it will try to replace as much of the path as possible with $(FME_MF_DIR). This is great if you're sharing a workspace + data with a colleague, but not so much when you publish to FME Server, as you say.

You can work around this by not referencing any paths in the same directory as the fmw file, or in a folder directly under the location of the fmw file.

Example: Your workspace is located in \\\\myserver\\folder1\\folder2\\myworkspace.fmw

If your workspace references anything under \\\\myserver\\folder1\\folder2\\ (including subfolders), you'll get the behavior you're observing. The solution would be to put data etc in a different folder, e.g. \\\\myserver\\folder1\\folder3\\

Spent an hour or more wondering why my pythonCaller was failing in Server but not workbench. Inspecting the parameters in fme server i could see this FME_MF_DIR_ENCODED macro looked to be the only difference. your folder reshuffle suggestion worked David even now thank you!