Hello FME Friends! 👋
Week one is in the books, and I crushed FME Accelerator and Integrate Data with the FME Platform! My GIS background is coming in clutch right now, making a lot of the concepts click and dusting off a few cobwebs along the way.
And a huge shoutout to everyone who chimed in on my first post! Hearing how you all learned FME, plus all the pro tips, gave me a real confidence boost. Thank you!
My biggest win of the week: I troubleshooted and installed a misbehaving version of FME Form 2025.0.X on my main machine, set up a virtual machine, installed FME Flow on it, and then connected it to FME Form on my Mac! The VM went dormant over the weekend and I haven’t worked up the courage to reconnect it yet, but let’s celebrate the small stuff 😅
Where I’m at now: I just kicked off FME Form Intermediate, and it’s a bit of a jump! I’m still wrapping my head around parameters (user, reader, writer, transformer). I get that they’re basically “the settings,” but knowing when each one matters (and finding them all in different corners of the UI) is taking some time. If you’ve got a great analogy, I’m all ears.
Now, what I really want to know: how do you know which transformer to use, when to use it, and how to set it up?! There are soooo many options, with overlapping abilities, it’s a wee bit overwhelming 😵💫
So let’s find out with a poll 📊
Stay tuned while I finish up Intermediate. After that, I’m thinking of taking a little detour into FME Flow before tackling FME Form Advanced… unless someone out there thinks that’s a terrible idea 👀
Notes from a Newbie #2: How Do You Pick the Right Transformer?!
+3- Safer
How do you find the right transformer?
+73- Celebrity
I’m a big fan of telling people just to try things in FME, you’ll often find that a transformer can do way more than it says on the surface.
I often read the help for transformers, you can uncover some pretty clever functionality by doing so.
Another thing is trying to distil your problem down, I’ve had conversations in the past (especially from people coming from Esri) where they’ve said ‘i just use one tool to solve this in Esri, FME doesn’t have that tool so it can’t do it’.
When you begin to break down what the tool is doing, you find that actually, FME can do that, you just have to build the process from its building blocks.
You then get the comment ‘oh, so i have to use multiple steps to do this’, you then point out that Esri has likely put a wrapper around a bunch of ArcPy functions and ‘forced’ the process to work in such a way.
When you break it down into the smaller blocks, you often find you have way more control over exactly how you configure each step and can fine tune the overall process to better deal with your current use case