Hello Group,

I manage a large directory of geospatial data, mostly in .tab. But times and needs are changing and I’d like to have the data available in other formats such as shp, geojson and gpkg.

In an ideal world we’d have a PostGIS database, but that’s not about to happen any time soon. So, for the time being, and probably into the foreseeable, I will continue to maintain flat files.

In FME Form, I need a process where I can point a FeatureReader at a folder and, in as few steps as possible, write each one to .shp, for example. I need to maintain the name (done so through Accumulation Mode: Merge Initiator and Result, I believe). So, for example a folder may contain 20 tab files (Zones_A.tab, Zones_B.tab, Zones_C.tab etc. etc.). I would want to create Zones_A.gpkg, Zones_B.gpkg, Zones_C.gpkg, but do so in one go.

I know I can read in files from a folder (via ‘Select Multiple folders/Files’ in the FeatureReader) and then publish as a different format to the same location (or different location) by connecting each read-in layer to a Connect Input port in the FeatureWriter. See image.

Whilst that’s not too time consuming if it’s a one-off or just a handful of layers, but what if the folder contains 150 .tabs that need translating? What if I want to run this process again on another 50 folders, for example. I certainly would to want to spend all day dragging out connecter lines manually.

Is there a more streamlined way of doing all of this?

To confirm: in a few steps possible I want read in all the .tabs in one specified folder, and then write out those datasets to a specified folder (or the same one) in a specified data format (e.g.: gpkg). And to do this without having drag out connecter lines to Connect Input ports in the FeatureWriter.

Thanks