"Implied" upstream external assets take precedence over "explicit" upstream external assets

[leejlFG]

Dagster version

1.7.4

What's the issue?

The documentation says that to define an upstream dependency for a dbt model where the upstream dependency that in Dagster outside of dbt, one should reference it in the sources.yml file:

sources:
  - name: dagster
    tables:
      - name: upstream
        meta:
          dagster:
            asset_key: ["upstream"]

However, if that upstream asset is defined as an explicit external asset in another code location with any description or metadata like this:

AssetSpec(
    key=["upstream"],
    description="This description disappears from the UI.",
)

The explicitly defined external asset is "overwritten" in the UI by an asset created implicitly by the dbt project. Any information added to the explicit external asset is unavailable, and the asset only exists in the dbt project's code location instead.

This behavior occurs outside of dbt projects as well - the same problem exists when adding deps to a Dagster asset in another code location as well. The auto-stubbed asset takes precedence over the explicit asset.

What did you expect to happen?

Expected behavior is for the dbt asset to correctly recognize and link to the correct asset in the other code location, instead of creating a new one and ignoring the explicit one.

How to reproduce?

Define one external asset in code location A, then define a downstream asset in code location B that references the external asset in path form as a dependency like deps=[["upstream"]].

Deployment type

Other Docker-based deployment

Deployment details

GRPC servers deployed on ECS.

Additional information

Problem still exists even after shutting down code location B and clearing any materializations with the UI or graphql wipeAssets mutation. As long as code location B remains shut down, the explicit external asset defined in code location A shows the correct information, but when turning code location B back on, the implicit asset takes precedence again.

When running locally with dagster dev this problem does not exist.

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