Dynamic and dynamic schemas

Have a look at the following articles which will hopefully answer your question:

• http://fmepedia.safe.com/articles/FAQ/When-designing-a-reader-writer-plug-in-how-do-I-know-if-my-schema-is-static-or-dynamic
• http://fmepedia.safe.com/articles/Samples_and_Demos/Dynamic-Schema-Examples-FME2011

In a nutshell, dynamic schemas will read whatever attributes are in the source file without caring what they are and auto-write them out to the destination format. 

 

 

Static schemas will only write out the attributes you've defined in your workspace.

 

 

So flexibility (dynamic) vs. control (static).

 

 

 

Hi Paul - Mark Ireland @ Safe gives you a good overview of Dynamic capabilities here:

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofXkJeE3Dz4&feature=plcp

 

 

Note that 'Dynamic' capability is often, but not always used with FME's ability to read/write data Generically using the Generic Reader/Writer. Both Generic and Dynamic when used together means that you can decouple format and schema completely from your process and write a workspace that can carry out data validation and cleansing on ANY data no matter what the format or schema.

Thank you both!

 

 

Both sources were very helpful

 

 

 

 

 

Hi Paul,

 

 

One interresting thing (which I didn't really find on the sites) is that you can even combine dynamic and static! If you make sure your workbench is using dynamic schemas correctly, you can still add fields to the output. Eg.: for spatial calculations.

 

 

Cheers,

Stijn