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Question

Get a list of valid reader/writer formats in a workbench

  • March 9, 2020
  • 2 replies
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jstanger
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Is there a way in a workbench to retrieve a list of all the valid formats that the version of FME currently running the workbench can use? A separate static file isn't really able to solve my issue. I know it is a strange request.

Essentially, we are using FME Server and will be using a Generic Reader to parse all user provided data then filter by a pre-configured list of valid formats my workbench will read from. The clients require the ability to add new formats and I'm trying to see if we can create a workbench that validates their configuration file against what FME can actually do.

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2 replies

A

Hi @jstanger, thank you for this question! We have a FORMAT reader internally that can generate a list of available reader/writer formats. I've reached out to my colleagues, and we put together a sample workspace where you could access this reader and further build on it. Please see attached fmw file and also the annotations for more details. We recommend using FORMAT_NAME attribute to identify the formats and first to filter by VISIBLE = YES for externally available formats only.

For your validations, do you check if the current FME has a license for these formats? Does this include downloadable or only shipped formats? Is there a need to differentiate if it's a reader or writer? There are a couple of attributes that you could test on as noted in the workspace, but feel free to let us know if you have further questions. Hope this helps!

FormatReader_SampleWorkspace.fmw

jstanger
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  • jstanger
  • Author
  • March 13, 2020

Hi @jstanger, thank you for this question! We have a FORMAT reader internally that can generate a list of available reader/writer formats. I've reached out to my colleagues, and we put together a sample workspace where you could access this reader and further build on it. Please see attached fmw file and also the annotations for more details. We recommend using FORMAT_NAME attribute to identify the formats and first to filter by VISIBLE = YES for externally available formats only.

For your validations, do you check if the current FME has a license for these formats? Does this include downloadable or only shipped formats? Is there a need to differentiate if it's a reader or writer? There are a couple of attributes that you could test on as noted in the workspace, but feel free to let us know if you have further questions. Hope this helps!

FormatReader_SampleWorkspace.fmw

Hi @alyssaatsafe, copying that reader between workbenches worked a treat. Just need to check there won't be any issues publishing to FME Server.

The config file I'm using is already referencing both FORMAT_NAME and FORMAT_NAME_LONG as well as an extension attribute to match against. I also have a writeable flag that I will be checking for licence status and will warn if it is currently unlicensed.

Since it appears that dynamically writing N files each with its format dynamically defined is a little beyond the FeatureWriter capacity right now I think it is safe enough to skip checking if the writer can be created.

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