Hello FME friends,

Welcome to the What's Up Wednesday newsletter for October 26th, 2022.

For reasons of space, this is an extract from the full version of this newsletter, which you can find here on LinkedIn.

Spatial "For Dummies"

Did you know that Safe Software helped to produce an e-book on this subject?

The actual title is "Spatial Data for the Enterprise for Dummies", but that was just a bit long to fit in a heading.

The book is available for free download from our website. Obviously, it's not in-depth technical content or training. Instead, it's a very good overview of the sort of work that we're all doing with FME.

For existing FME users, I think it's a great book to share, for example, with the manager who doesn't quite get what you do, or what the potential is. Like, "You remember what I was saying about Real Time Tracking, and Digital Twins? This book shows how useful they would be."

And they might not even notice you've just implied that they're a dummy!

Community Guide to FME Best Practices

You might (I hope) remember that this is a crowd-sourced project to produce a community guide to one of the most important aspects of FME. Why community? Because best practice is a very imprecise subject. Every user has their own ideas on what is best and there is no single correct answer.

We did a brief survey of users and the project is now underway! If you would like to take part - or even just follow along with progress - you can join a new user group on the FME Community.

Our first task: create a list of topics that come under the heading of workspace style. What would you include?

Automation Apps in FME 2022.2

FME 2022.2 is (probably) less than a week away from being released. On the Wednesday after release, I'll go into some of the details of what's new and improved.

But, the big update is Automation Apps. You might be familiar with Workspace Apps already. They're a way to create a website that runs FME workspaces, prompting for user parameters at the same time.

If you visit fme.ly/CommunityCafe then you're looking at a "Gallery App", which is a collection of both plain links and workspace apps. If you click on the Community Badges link and then on "Redeem Webinar Code", then you'll see a workspace is being run and the user prompted to enter a username and code (available in all our webinars):

So that's a Workspace App. An Automation App does the same thing, but instead of running a workspace and prompting for values with "user parameters", it runs an Automation and prompts for values with "Automation keys".

We ran a Sneak Peek presentation on Automation Apps yesterday. It got a bit chaotic, because streaming to LinkedIn didn't really work, but eventually, we switched to Twitch/YouTube and got a good recording.

FME Server, the REST API, and Python

Back in September, I mentioned an article from Martin Ekstrand about how to monitor FME Server status using Python and the REST API. This week he has another great example.

When upgrading from FME Server 2021 to 2022, Martin noticed that some workspaces used Python 2.7, which is deprecated in 2022.0.

How do you find those workspaces? Simple! Using the REST API in a new Python script!

And Martin kindly wrote a description in an article called FME Server Python 2.x Compatibility Checker. It's a must-read article if you are planning to upgrade your FME Server to 2022, or just want to check your workspaces anyway.

Thanks for sharing this, Martin. It's both a useful tool and a great example of using the FME REST API.

FME on YouTube

I noticed a number of FME-related videos online this week. Well, it wasn't hard to notice, since two of them are mine!

In this video, I use the RasterExtractor and BinaryEncoder transformers to extract rasters in such a way that they can be embedded into HTML.

I've started to create shorter videos - I'm calling it "Five Minute FME" - to give short and snappy tips. In the first of these, I show how to smarten up your FME Workbench by using condensed fonts such as Roboto Condensed and Barlow Condensed.

Over in Ireland, Safe partner IMGS recently held their FME Intelligence 2022 event. There were two sessions during the day, each preserved with its own video.

The first session's activities included The Future of FME, and Automated Data-Driven Reporting (at around 1:23:30 in the video).

The second session included using FME Server with webhooks for Tableau reporting (with an awesome title slide), and Automated Map Production with FME (about 30 minutes into the video).

And if you want a reminder of the FME User Conference - and what good weather looks like - then this great video from con terra should help!

Full Content

For the full What's Up Wednesday, visit this article on LinkedIn.