How can I temporarily limit the number of records that I'm reading from an ArcGIS feature layer?

You should be able to do this under the reader parameters in the navigator

That was my initial thought as well, but he wants to read a specific date range.

I'd like to only process a range of dates.

Thanks for your response. The reader type shows: Esri ArcGIS Online (AGOL) Feature Service. When I double click on it, I see the Where clause in the Parameters tab. It looks straight forward. I'll try to fill it out now. I'm now thinking that I can use the objectid.

I have two tables, each with a reader. The first table is for locations and the second table is for people. They have a one-to-many relationship: Locations -> People (each location can have one or more persons).

I think that I can specify that objectid needs to be greater than a certain number which could give me the last X number of records. Or, perhaps I can specify a range. I'll give this a try. I suspect that I will need to specify a where clause on the reader for the second table as well.

As I mentioned, I have two tables, each with a reader. The first table is for locations and the second table is for people. They have a one-to-many relationship: Locations -> People (each location can have one or more persons).

I added a where clause for each reader.

Locations table: "objectid" BETWEEN 23277 AND 23528

People table: "objectid" BETWEEN 4424 AND 4684

Now, I'm processing a few hundred records instead of about 8000. The processing time is a few seconds instead of about 40 seconds. Now I can incrementally change my workspace. When I have everything working correctly, I'll remove the Where clause.

I couldn't figure out how to filter on the date mostly because only the Locations table had a date and I needed a where clause on both tables/readers. Thanks for everyone's help. This was my first question.

You might be new to FME but you're spot on in restricting the input while you develop the workspace. That's a good call.

Another way to help would be to use Feature Caching (the Cache button on the toolbar). It takes a bit longer on the first run, but after that, you only need to run the workspace on changes that you make. All existing readers/transformers that don't change have a cache of the data at that stage of the process, which is quicker than re-processing it.

Thanks for the tip. I have recently started making use of caching. I how hovering the mouse over the Run button shows the readers/transformer that will update. (I don't see a Cache button on the toolbar, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.)

For this particular situation, I'm glad that I was able to restrict the input using a where clause in the reader. I had 8,000+ records and limited the input to a few hundred records.

This is helpful, thanks for sharing.