Hello FME'ers,

I'm posting today instead of Liz, so let's see what news I can find...

Custom Transformers

A short blog article was just posted showing how the new parameter editor dialog in 2021 can help create custom transformers, and how you can publish them to the FME Hub. That reminds me, I have a small custom transformer to make and publish so I will try and record doing that and post it to YouTube as a practical demo.

FME Hub Update

Speaking of the FME Hub, its test suite engine has now been upgraded to FME2021, so your content is now tested against the newest FME. However, that version on Linux no longer includes Python v2.7 - so if your content used Python 2.7, you might find it now fails the test suite and requires an update to use Python v3.

New Articles

A new article on creating 2D network topology is now available on the knowledge base. The first few transformers are what I'd call "Just in Case" transformers. You might not need to snap, deaggregate, or otherwise clean your data, but you put these transformers in, just in case.

There's also how to Run an Automation using the Manual Trigger. This functionality is new in FME Server for 2021 and, as I understand it, can be useful for testing an automation without it going live. You can even call it from the REST API, which opens up a whole other world of possibilities too.

Webinars

Thanks again to everyone who came to the Who Wants to be a Data Expert Extraordinaire webinar yesterday. If you missed it, you can watch this replay. Although it was just some light-hearted fun, some of the harder questions might be of interest. Upcoming webinars include some good FME Server content, including Advanced Job Control (queue and dynamic engines) and Data Stream Processing. If you use FME Server at all, or are considering it, that's content you won't want to miss.

General

You might have noticed we're on a bit of a hiring binge now. So if you are interested in helping to create the Data Integration platform with the best support for spatial, check out our vacancies here - and be sure to pass them on to anyone else who might be interested.

Last week I wrote a question-of-the-week about how to auto-expose format attributes when adding a reader. If you find yourself doing this manually, check it out.

Tweet of the Week: Go check out https://twitter.com/GavinJJeter/status/1374260891177283585 and see what you think. It's a great video demo of using FME apps to do a spatial query on Quickbooks. Love it!