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Question

why doesnt FME read excel columns that start with an asterisk?


Hi.

 

 

I'm trying to get my FME workbench to read an excel spreadsheet that is automatically generated and has an asterisk in the column header of two columns. It reads this and displays it in the drop down list of attributes, but when I connect an inspector straight to the reader (I'm trying to get it to ignore a title line)  It wont read any of the columns with asterisks. They're not empty theyre just not there.

 

 

Does anyone know why this is or if there's a workaround?

 

 

I've tried creating a copy of the file, deleting the asterisks, pointing to that, then adding them back in but of course the workbench then cant find the columns. Since its an automattically produces xls file, I can't edit it manually everytime so what I need is for the FME workbench to ignore the title line and read all of the attributes as they are.

 

 

Thanks

3 replies

  • Author
  • April 14, 2014
Edit: I've just seen that the missing rows appear under attrubutes in the feature information apanel when I click on a row in the table in inspector. Its just the columns that are excluded from the table... wierd

 

 


david_r
Evangelist
  • April 14, 2014
Hi,

 

 

I tested with FME 2014 SP1 and it seems to work fine. Since asterisks often have a special meaning (wildcards), FME did replace them with an underscore on the input feature type, but otherwise both the attributes and the values were read and displayed without a problem.

 

 

If you have an older version of FME, be aware that the Excel reader got a major overhaul around FME 2013 SP2 (if I'm not mistaken). There were also some bugs that got ironed out later, so I'd strongly recommend to at least use FME 2013 SP4.

 

 

David

  • Author
  • April 14, 2014
ahh. I'm in 2013 SP1, perhaps an upgrade is in order. For the benefit of anyone else using this, AttributeRenamer seems to do the trick - just remove the asterisks.

 

 

Cheers

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