In short: Readers and Writers have and option to change a named database connection into an embedded one.
This is our standard way of making sure that workspaces published to FME Server don’t overwrite other users' connections.
And it is easy to do in FME Desktop:
However, this not possible for FeatureReader, FeatureWriter, SQLCreator or SQLExecutor ! How many of your workspaces contain one or many of these transformers ? More than 50% ? 80% ? Yeah, I thought so …
Consider the time savings, when in development you can add your transformers with named connections, and when publishing to FME Server you don’t have to embed the connection parameters by hand in every flaming transformer.
In fact, it should be made possible in the ”Database Connections” section of Navigator - so that all transformers using that same connection would get embedded with one click !!!
Read on for a case (almost) from real life ..
Consider this scenario:your organization has several eager FME users, some of them fairly new, and you decide to let them publish their workspaces to FME Server. The users have learned enough FME to use saved ”Database Connections” in Desktop (because you teached them – or they learned it from an FME Webinar!).
You yourself have made and deployed some critical scheduled workspaces using your own ”standardized” Database Connections like ”REPORTING”, ”CRM”, etc.
After awhile you get emails from business users complaining that they haven’t received their critical reports for after sales marketing or contact lists of potential new customers.
You start investigating and find out that your workspaces have crashed when trying to connect to the ”REPORTING” database. So what on earth has happened ?
You finally find out that someone has actually over-written your database connection in FME Server. Someone has used the same database connection name ”REPORTING”, clicked ”Yes” when asked by FME whether existing connection with the same name should be replaced, and done the damage.
But you remember that you told your FME users to replace their named database connections with embeded connection parameters in Readers and Writers when publishing their workspaces, and everyone says they have done so!
So now you look at the Database Connections definition of ”REPORTING” in FME Server and find out that it connects to a completely different data warehouse (the one called HR_REPORTING). You then call the HR guy who made the latest deployment and ask him why he didn’t embed the connection parameters.
He claims he did, only that he added one FeatureReader, tested with his named database connection ”REPORTING”, but could find the command to embed the connection parameters in the transformer. So he thought FME would somehow automagically take care of it, as it does for many things, and published his workspace anyway ...
