Controlling Creator order

Hi @kim,

This looks like the idea suggested by @takashi:

https://knowledge.safe.com/content/idea/19676/control-the-execution-order-of-starter-transformer.html

Safe is already working on it, I think.

In the beta build list, under build 16449, there is this item:

Not such a fancy implementation as you are suggesting, but you could download and install the latest FME beta to see if it works for you!

Yes, this is in the 2016.1 betas now. I was experimenting with it last night. Seems to work very well. .

UPDATE: Originally we used the names of the creators to control their order, but we changed to an explicit dialog to move them up and down. And made it clear that all creators will fire before any features enter a transformer from a reader. And "Create At End" Creators go after the readers have all finished.

Original announcement below:

We are using the lexical order of the names of the transformers to govern the execution. So if you look at them in the navigator pane, that is the order they will fire. They will always go before any features from a "reader" are read in. If you need to interleave that, then you could use a Creator followed by a FeatureReader. We can't technically make Creators go in between "readers" that are otherwise added.

Even if you have custom transformers, within the custom transformer the Creators will fire in the right order, and if you make a custom transformer with no inputs, it will fire in the order of its name with respect to all other Creator-type transformers

See also Takashi's version of the suggestion over here.

Thanks Erik Jan, I did a few searches for it myself but couldn't find it.

Thanks for the explanation, will definitely give that a try!

This is great news, thanks! One thing that would help a lot, would be to extend the Creator setting "Create at end" so that you could also ask it to fire either BEFORE or AFTER all the readers. This would be fantastic for scenarios like "Suppliers first = Yes" etc.

Create At End now does go after the last reader. As well, we've moved to an explicit dialog to do the ordering as opposed to alphabetical. So you can just right-click on a creator-type transformer to set the order.

Fantastic!

Great improvement, the lexical sorting sounded (and was I think) rather iffy! Still wish I could intermingle with readers, but this is a big step in the right direction.

This has been released as part of FME 2016.1 . Visit http://www.safe.com/downloads to download and try it.