I use more and more QGIS and usually I like to check things in QGIS. I think it would be a nice way to ease this, giving the chance of opening QGIS instead of FME Data Inspector with the inspectors outputs as temporary layers.
Page 1 / 1
Rather than specifically QGIS I think it might be useful to set "any other application" as an inspection application. If an organisation uses Microstation to maintain all their data then ultimately Microstation is what they'd want to inspect in. Ditto for ArcGIS, AutoCAD and so on.
However... it would add some overhead to FME, rather than the Data Inspector looking at the FFS the data would need to be saved in an intermediary format (which would most likely differ from format to format and would most likely not have FME's rich data model) which is then read by the other application.
So I think this would be very hard to work out in the long run.
That's why i said QGIS, you can read/export2 dwg, dxf, shp, filegdb,dgn...
I'm sure we can come up with a format that QGIS doesn't support, but that's not really the point I was trying to make.
What I was trying to say is that the benefit of FME and the Data Inspector is that it's really just looking at FFS data so it's easy to maintain. Adding other inspection applications (because it wouldn't be limited to just QGIS) would add a lot of additional workload.
You could consider creating a custom transformer that writes out to temporary files in a format of your choosing (FeatureWriter) and then start QGIS (the SystemCaller can do that) with that temporary file.
A checkbox on feature writer to write to FME_TEMP and open in default application? It would be quite generic and could be used with any other formats (pdf, xls, doc, etc).