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Question

Writer - an Access database with special characters in field names causing issues

  • 10 January 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 7 views

My workspace's goal is to import the contents ot two old Access databases into a new, differently structured Access database.  The new database has four fields that have forward slashes in the field names. These are being interpreted as underscores by FME.

 

 

When I run the workspace, I get an error indicating that my new database doesn't have the field `Esmt_ppty_lease Date' (the first field it runs across with an underscore I guess) -which of course it doesn't.  What's the simplest solution here?  I'd rather not have to rename the four fields in the new Access database as that has other implications.
Assuming this is a one off, is there any problem, loading the data with a different name and then just manually going and adding in the "/"s? Perhaps I've missed something?

 

 

Special characters are always a challenge and even though Access may support naming conventions like this they are not especially portable and can often result in very ugly warnings returned by the target system or just confusion! In this case it seems FME is tripping up in attempting to clean up the potential problem.

 

 

You might try the ODBC writer instead of the Access writer to see if it performs differently. But I'd doubt it as the default operation of the adding an attribute name anywhere in FME manually with a / in the name is to swap it to an underscore.

 


HI

 

 

I'm having the same issue with access database and fields that contains caracters such as : slash /, dash -, apostrophe '

 

 

Fme is unable to write fields with those caracters, which means trouble for me.

 

For now, i'm renaming the fields and I need to remember to rename manually the fields using Access afterwards, but unfortunatly sometimes I miss one database...oups! 

 

 

Is there any chance that some day, FME will write these caracters?

 

 

Thank you for your answers!

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