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Today I noticed something about reading the same geodatabase feature class twice, using multiple feature types within the same reader. FME doesn't do this.

I had one single merged feature type set up, to process all data within the geodatabase. This was the only reader in the workspace. At some point I needed one specific feature class from the geodatabase for a specific function, so I used the "Import feature type" function to do it. From there on, that feature class would no longer be output through the single merged reader, but only through the separate one. Suddenly my workspace was no longer outputting all data from my geodatabase, since the separate feature class was discarded halfway through the workspace. However, there was nothing that indicated that this was going on - looking at the properties of my single merged feature type, it still claimed to read all feature classes. Disabling the separate feature type did not affect the single merged feature type - it still didn't read everything. Is this intended behaviour or a bug?

In my case, this was the ArcObjects reader in FME Desktop 2015.1.

Hi @ngoorman

I would say it is an intended behaviour. If you need to read one of the feature classes separately (in addition to reading it as a part of the single merged feature type) you can add one more Reader that will read this feature class only. However, I would suggest avoiding reading the same data twice - instead you can use Tester, TestFilter, or AttributeFilter to filter features that belong to the feature class that you need to process separately.

Hi @ngoorman. in my observation, it seems that the behavior could be different depending on FME version.

FME 2015.1.3 build 15575 and FME 2016.1 build 16492: The imported reader feature type reads features in the specified feature type, and the existing single merged feature type reads features in all other feature types. I think this exactly matches your expected behavior.

FME 2015.0 build 15253: The imported reader feature type reads features in the specified feature type, and the existing single merged feature type reads features in just a single feature type. Other feature types are ignored.
However, if I selected explicitly every feature type for the "Feature Types to Read" parameter of the reader, the single merged feature type reads features in all feature types other than the imported feature type.

I've uninstalled FME 2015.1 already, so cannot confirm the behavior of your version unfortunately, but I guess that an improvement about this has been done between 2015.1 and 2015.1.3.

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