Skip to main content

We are currently managing about 500+ workbenches, some in the filesystem some on FME Server. We try to name them based on the datasets they are working on and the source and destination systems/databases.

We do not know if it´s the best way to keep up with finding them again, but up to this scale it works.

A best-practice HowTo or tutorials about workbench documentation and management at larger scale would be great, maybe there are better ways than we do.

This is how I usually manage workspaces on a file system:

/<project>/<theme>/<verb>_<dataset>.fmw

  • <project> is the name of the project
  • <theme> is a group of operations on a particular theme. The theme can e.g. be centered around a dataset or a use-case
  • <verb> is an action describing what the workspace does, e.g. "export" or "import"
  • Finally, <dataset> is the major dataset being consumed by the workspace

Of course all the strings are sanititzed (i.e. no weird characters etc in the path names) and everything is versioned with git.

On the server I try to use the the same methodology. Since you cannot nest repositories, I concatenate the repository names as <project>_<theme>, whenever necessary.

Hopefully that can give you some ideas.


In addition to @david_r's comments, the last part of the Desktop Basic course covers best practices. It does focus on the desktop / workspace development aspect of it and not so much on a more overarching management of workspaces, but it's a start.

I would also recommend, if you haven't done so already, to standardize the workspace layouts, for example by using a template such as this one by @lars_de_vries. This will help you maintain the workspaces with a larger group of people.