Using Mapped Network Drives

To make your work easier with shared network folders, you can map network drives for quick access on your user account. However, if the processes you publish from Studio are located on that drive, the situation described below occurs.

Observed Behavior

Packages published from Studio are not visible in the UiPath Assistant.

Cause

The issue occurs when you use a mapped network drive for your packages. The location of the packages you publish to Orchestrator can be seen in the UiPath.settings file on the Robot machine, under the NuGetServerUrl parameter. The mapped network drive is available to the user that created it, while the Robot Service runs system-wide.

Solution

One of the following methods can be used to solve this issue:

Converting the Robot to User-Mode

You can convert the Robot from Service-Mode to User-Mode by running the .MSI installer and choosing the User-Mode during update.

Check out the Updating the Robot guide for more details.

Mapping a Network Drive for the Local System

1. Download the Sysinternals Suite. It contains the PsExec.exe tool, which is required for this operation.
2. Open an elevated Command Prompt instance.
3. Use the cd command to navigate to the location where you downloaded the Sysinternals Suite (such as cd C:\Downloads\SysinternalsSuite).
4. Use the PsExec -i -s cmd.exe command. A confirmation dialog appears.
5. Click the Accept button to install the PsExec.exe service. This makes it possible to map a network drive for the Local System.
6. Use the net use z: \\ServerName\SharedFolder /persistent:yes command to map the drive, where ServerName is your server and SharedFolder is the location of the drive you want to map.

If you want to remove the mapped network drive, you need to repeat the steps above, but using the net use z: /delete command instead. You can find out more on this page.

Unattended robot cannot find mapped drive

Observed behavior

Unattended robots cannot find a mapped shared drive when running a background process.

Cause

This is the behavior of non-interactive Windows logon sessions.

Resolution

In order to use mapped share drives in headless mode, the drive would need to be remapped for every job the robot starts. The remapping also applies to the scenario in which the robot machine is restarted.

For example, by having an explicit invocation in the workflow of the net use Z: \\unc\path command before using the shared drive.