Archived

Find and Replace function for given attribute

Related products:FME Form

6 months ago
September 18, 2024
3 replies
51 views

judith
Observer

Hi,

renaming an attribute in large workspaces oftentimes takes a lot of time because of the related manual adjustments needed.

I would appreciate a function that is able to change a given attribute to another given attribute within a whole workspace in every Transformer and Writer.

Best regards

Judith

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+26

bwn
Evangelist
564 replies
6 months ago
September 19, 2024

Similarly would note that this is desirable but there is an existing Transformer that almost does this already: NullAttributeMapper

NullAttributeMapper is currently mis-named. It actually does do All/Selected Attribute search and replace for more than just Nulls. It will look for any fixed value, or any RegEx pattern.

What it is missing, is the ability to use the current attribute value in the replacement function, + more broader comparator support such as > , < , LIKE, IN() etc. Otherwise it is actually very close to an “All Attribute Search/Replace”

+11

denniswilhelm
Contributor
21 replies
6 months ago
September 19, 2024

bwn wrote:

Similarly would note that this is desirable but there is an existing Transformer that almost does this already: NullAttributeMapper

NullAttributeMapper is currently mis-named. It actually does do All/Selected Attribute search and replace for more than just Nulls. It will look for any fixed value, or any RegEx pattern.

What it is missing, is the ability to use the current attribute value in the replacement function, + more broader comparator support such as > , < , LIKE, IN() etc. Otherwise it is actually very close to an “All Attribute Search/Replace”

The result might be the same, but it’s only a hotfix and the workspace will only get more complicated.

I think the initial idea is more about refactoring Workspaces and therefore changing all occurences of specific elements (like attributes) throughout the Workspace. If you rename user parameters then the change will be applied everywhere. This is different with attributes. If I change an attribute early in the Workspace all following transformers will be invalid.

I guess a more general idea would be to provide a Search & Replace funtionality. Right now you can only search for strings in FME Form, but a replace is missing.