How can I determine which version of an FME Workspace has been published to Flow?

Hi @raymondbrunner, the workspace’s build information is shown at the top of a job log in FME Flow, but other than that you’d need to download the workspace and view the information in FME Form. If you’d like to see that information from the Workspaces page on the FME Flow Web UI, or elsewhere, I’d encourage you to submit a product idea https://community.safe.com/ideas

You could also look at enabling version control, which allows you to do a git commit on publish and enter a comment that is visible from the FME Flow Web UI.

https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME-Flow/WebUI/Version-Control.htm

Thank you @mattmatsafe for the reply, and for pointing out the Last Save Build for an FME Workspace is reported in the top of the job log in FME Flow.

However, the Last Save Date and History Entries do not appear to be included.  I also appreciate your suggestion on enabling version control, although that will not solve my use case.

Often I continue to develop or improve a workspace but not publish every iteration directly to Flow.  Each of my workspaces include a large font annotation in the upper left that indicates the version (or date) of the changes.  Previously, we could view workspaces directly within Flow, and I could confirm which version of the workspace had last been published by quickly viewing this embedded annotation.  However the recent releases of Flow no longer allow for viewing a workspace - I now have to download the workspace from Flow and then open within Form, if I wish to view these annotations.

I tried including a User Parameter with the workspace for a “VERSION_DATE” and had to remember to update it prior to publishing the workspace into Flow.  The unfortunate consequence of this work around turned out to be if I did not go into Flow after publishing and overwriting the VERSION_DATE user parameter, with the same value, the automation would generate warnings at every execution that Expected parameters had not all been provided even though the parameter had a value, it had not been assigned within Flow.

I have submitted this as a product Idea, for those that may be encountering a similar need:  

It might be a different way of working can help. If you fill in documentation in the Navigator, it will appear when you go to run the workspace. That is instead of creating the annotation of the canvas. But maybe you don’t like that, so there are other options

How confident are you with an API?

You can build a process to look at the workspace, which gives you a number of things.

The call is a get https://<url>/fmerest/v3/repositories/<repo>/items/<workspacename>.fmw

and will return things like:

But history is very much a FME Form thing when it comes to Flow. But you can always read the workspace and use the FME Workspace Reader to get the history from the workspace in FME Flow.

I actually use a private parameter when I want to track specific versions like this. I have a startup python script which just prints the version into the log file, bit of course you can just use a logger transformer as well. A private parameter like this is good because it’s much less likely to get set or overwritten at run-time.

It does mean I always need to remember to update the version parameter (which I often forget).