Has anyone else seen this?
This is pretty critical for me as most of my MapInfo users are still on 8.5.
I'm putting in a support request for this too, but wanted to ping here as well.
Question
FME 2013 SP2 - MITAB minimum version 9 now?
+5- Contributor
I recall that in previous versions of FME you could occasionally get forced to version 9 of MapInfo by including a column type (date) or coordinate system that wasn't supported in earlier versions, but it appears that with 2013 SP2 now all of my MapInfo output has been forced to version 9 with no changes in the workspaces.
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+22- Contributor
Hi Jason - Hope all is well. I actually bumped into this a little while back and it's down to some changes on the writers. The change in behaviour is due to a change made to the MITAB writer in FME 2013. It now has a parameter called 'TAB File Version' that let's the user explicitly set which version of tab file to create. This parameter defaults to version 9. The writer will always honor the file version selected by the user. The MFAL writer does not have this option and so will continue to use the old behaviour of always using the lowest possible file version.
It's actually possible to add the new writer into an old workspace with the old writer already in it and compare the difference.
Hope that helps, Dave
+5- Contributor
Thanks Dave, Apparently there have been a couple gotchas in this versioning implementation in 2013 SP2 that could cause problems. PR 46096: MFAL writer missing dialog box for version selection. Apparently it was there on a previous build then removed. Not an issue for me. PR 46099: MITAB writer allows the version parameter to be set on new writers, but uses v9 as default value for old workspaces/writers without the version parameter set rather than using the lowest version possible (previous behavior). This is a major problem for me because all of my old writers are now outputting v9 tab files. The fix (since I'm using MITAB) is fairly straightforward but laborious replacement of writers with current version then setting output version number. The actual fix shouldn't take too long, but the extent of physical touch required coupled with potential new behaviour from the upgraded writers is going to mean I'll have to do a thorough QA on all of the output tab files.
+22- Contributor
Hi Jason - I have to admit it was close to ignorant about Reader/Writer versioning. With transformers its a bit more blatant with the ability to toggle the version number but I have added a vote to try to get the versioning of readers and writers a little more visible as this caught one of customers out in a similar way. As you say, its fixable but a bit of a headache.