I was recently putting together an example of calling a third party application and wrapping it up in a custom transformer and I thought I'd share a (fun) variation I came up with to demonstrate a point.

Filtering the posts on the Knowledge Center is now a little more functional than it used to be and a few of you will have noticed that the filter options build the URL to a standard format, so of course you can get FME to do that for you too. Quite a few websites use this approach and communicating with APIs is quite similar, so FME lends itself to the task very well.

Given that I'm feeling pretty hard-done-by, that I did post a question on TLAPD (Talk Like a Pirate Day for those land-lubbers out there) and yet I still wasn't granted a "special" Pirate Chief badge. I thought I'd create a small BadgeChecker transformer that incorporates:- Custom Transformer technology - Embedded, though it could be exported and shared. - Attribute hierarchy in the AttributeManager (a feature that is sometimes overlooked).- SystemCaller - A neat tool to initiate a command that can be used to get another program to do something for you. Have a look at @dmitribagh's cool article here for more. - Published parameters - so you can specify a date range within which to look and the name of the author to go and have a look for. The transformer basically checks to make sure that I didn't dream it and that I actually "Asked a question on Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept 19th)"... give it a try and adapt it to see if you're owed anything. I hope it's a useful demonstrator for someone out there and if a happy by-product is the fact that I get a new badge, then so be it. Of course, I could always "get a life"... but hey, it's Friday!