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Hi everyone, I want to create a Esri Personal Geodatabase whose structure is specified in an Excel table. Is that possible? How can I achieve that?

This is not a standard functionality, but it is possible to build something like this.

I also have seen something like this on the FME Hub.

https://hub.safe.com/?page=1&page_size=10&order=relevance&query=gdb%20excel

The default solution would be to use an XML workspace document to use as input.


If you already have an ArcGIS product installed, a solution could be to parse the Excel information into a single feature and send it off to a PythonCaller that uses ArcPy methods to create the database, using e.g.

An alternative could be to create an FME schema feature from the Excel and send it to a regular writer together with your data. You can find some information about his here: https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407525774221-Dynamic-Workflows-Advanced-Example-Modifying-the-Schema-Feature

 


I do this.As @david_r mentioned, using a dynamic workflow and creating the schema feature.

There are certain things I use FME for, and others I use ArcPy (but all built into one workspace).

I create gdb and add domains with arcpy, and then create the featureclasses with FME (featureclasses and fields/alias/type), and back to arcpy to associate domains and create indexes.

You can do most of it in FME, but I also wanted to be able to add fields, domains, indexes etc over time due to the ever changing nature of what we built this process for, and all the surrounding processes that support and build upon this. So I used arcpy to meet those needs.

Here is an example of one of the many sheets contains alias, field name, domain association, type and indexes:

 


This is not a standard functionality, but it is possible to build something like this.

I also have seen something like this on the FME Hub.

https://hub.safe.com/?page=1&page_size=10&order=relevance&query=gdb%20excel

The default solution would be to use an XML workspace document to use as input.

Thank you so much for your advice, the custom workspace mentioned above seem to be exactly what I want and for sure it will take some time to check for that. 


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