Hello, a question about the UI. I see that there are a number of filters that are currently supported like

Project

,

Branch

, and

User

. Is it possible to use the

User

filter without having specified the

@project

decorator?

yup! you can use

User

without specifying any of the other filters, e.g. "show me all flow runs by this user". The project/branch data is optional and only available for flows using an

@project

decorator I'd recommend giving this a read if you're curious as well https://docs.metaflow.org/scaling/tagging

Hmm. I seem to be unable to filter my SFN executions by

User

. What value would this be populated with? In the definition of my SFN statemachine, I see the following added as environment variables to each step:

METAFLOW_USER=SFN
METAFLOW_OWNER=my-user
USER=my-user

Are any of these representative of what we should be able to filter on?

Have a look at the

User

column of your list of runs. In this case I had a user called

sandbox

. Then I typed an

s

in the User field and it autocompleted.

Ah that explains things a bit. Do you know why this column would be empty then?

are you running your flows from the command line? If so can you check

whoami

?

We're kicking them off as step functions, making sure that we're setting

METAFLOW_USER

. Is that not sufficient?

There is logic within the UI that only displays the user if it is a "regular" user. If you click on a run and go to "task details" you will see a bunch of tags.... only if

"user:xxxxx"

exists, will xxxxx be displayed on the Metaflow UI.

Ah, yeah the

METAFLOW_USER=SFN

bit is due to how deployed SFNs can be triggered by other users/services. some extra context - https://outerbounds-community.slack.com/archives/C02116BBNTU/p1630535475071000

Circling back to this thread. How would one ensure that when an SFN execution is kicked off that the person who triggered it gets set properly? Specifically, where should

"user:xxxxx"

be set so that the UI actually presents something useful?

Thanks for the follow up. The GH issue for a polished solution for this is still pending. https://github.com/Netflix/metaflow/issues/681 However I can offer a workaround:

from metaflow import FlowSpec, step, Parameter, current, Run
import os
class HelloFlow(FlowSpec):
  local_user = Parameter('local_user', default=os.environ.get('USER'))

  @step
  def start(self):
    if self.local_user:
      run = Run(f'{current.flow_name}/{current.run_id}')
      if os.environ.get('METAFLOW_RUNTIME_NAME') in ('argo-workflows', 'step-functions'):
        run.add_tag(f"triggered_by:{self.local_user}")
    ...

The outcome is that Metaflow UI will show the triggering USER as "trigger_by:USER" on the Metaflow UI, under user tags on the RHS. I know this is not ideal but hope this unblocks your team somewhat. Note while we don't expect the moving parts here to change soon (e.g. the METAFLOW_RUNTIME_NAME env var, local resolution of "USER" in Parameter), this workflow goes beyond our official public facing API / backward compatibility promises.