Hello, here's something I've come across many times in FME. When a translation sends no records to the writer, no files will be written for that writer. This means that if I am updating something daily and one day no records are sent to the writer, the file will remain as the day before (outdated), and this could cause confusion to customers.

It is the same issue expressed in this thread https://knowledge.safe.com/questions/3785/empty-mapinfo-tab-or-shape-file.html

However, no satisfactory answer is provided.

The idea would be to include an option (a checkbox) in the writer or in the workbench to "allow writing empty files if no records are sent to the writer".

The thing is that some systems need a file to be there, even if it is empty. Otherwise, loading will fail. So things like, removing all the files from folder before running the workbench won't work for me because the system is requiring all the listed files.

Probably this is something that many people has come across already, and there are many workarounds, but this option should at least be considered, as it would save a lot of time applying those workarounds.

Hope that makes sense.