Hi community.

We have a client which for a long time has been using SDE/Legacy writer in a (in my world) complex FME workspace which they have written in-house. The workspace has several problems after upgrading to their environment to FME 2017, ArcGIS 10.5, Oracle 11g. The workspace will run on FME Server.

The db has, 43 tables, 54 relationship classes, 8 featureclasses. In the database the 8 featureclasses has a field which is defined as Esri "Global ID" and 26 of the tables has an "Global Id" field. As they previously have written with Esri Legacy they have prepopulated the "Global ID" fields and used them as foreign keys in other tables (as GUID datatype).

My understanding is for ArcGIS 10.5 (and later):

- Legacy/SDE30 writer is not supported (?)

- Alternatively using Esri Geodatabase (ArcSDE Geodb) writer one can not prepopulate a field with the "Global ID" datatype using the UUID or GUID transformers

This leads to my conclusion:

- the workspace is in need of a major overhaul, and (ouch)

- the datamodel itself may be in need of a revision where several fields may need to be re-defined to Esri datatype "GUID" instead of "Global Id".

Are my conclusions correct or am I missing something here? Any smart solutions or workarounds? Rewriting the FME workspace here is a bit challenging, but also changing the datamodel may cause (I guess) several problems..

Feedback appreciated :)