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Quick Data Inspector / Preview

Related products:FME Form
  • July 27, 2017
  • 15 replies
  • 96 views
I

I've been using a competitors product a bit of late and one great feature it has that makes FME very frustrating is how long inspectors take to open . Often all you need is a couple of data rows to decide what you want to do and the alternative product allows you to click on any transform post run and INSTANTLY see 1Mb of data for each input and output port. This makes building workspaces so much faster. The sacrifice to make this possible is the configurable 1Mb limit on the data.

I can't find a way to come close to this in FME Desktop

So,

- When doing a full inspector allow preview of the data that opens very fast.

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15 replies

redgeographics
VIP
Forum|alt.badge.img+63

You can sort of get to this with the Max Features To Read parameter on a reader:

'

FME rocks! \m/
david_r
Celebrity
  • david_rCelebrity
  • July 27, 2017

There's some very intersting stuff on the way for FME 2018 and beyond, have a look around the 41-minute mark here: https://www.safe.com/presentation/sneak-peek-at-fme-2018-and-the-road-beyond/

fmelizard
Safer
Forum|alt.badge.img+22
  • fmelizardSafer
  • Safer
  • July 31, 2017

This is a great idea and one that we are actively working on from the standpoint of faster rendering of data, doing the display inside of FME Workbench and inspecting at any point in the workflow. We'll post here as soon as we have a Beta available.

fmelizard
Safer
Forum|alt.badge.img+22
  • fmelizardSafer
  • Safer
  • July 31, 2017

Thanks @iangilmour for the encouragement in this area. As @david_r mentioned, we did show this type of functionality during our "futures" talk at FME UC in May. And we are actively working on this right now. FME 2017.1 will have much faster data inspection but you still are popping between applications. You can use "Run with Full Inspection" mode so you can click anywhere on the #s and see the results quickly in the external viewer. But we know it would be even handier to have this right in FME Workbench. If you have huge data volumes, then using @redgeographics 's idea of limiting the input is a good one as well.

If you or anyone else would be interested to work with previews of this functionality, let us know. Once FME 2018 Betas go up, there may be ways for us to enable it in an experimental way for true early adopters to try out and give us feedback around.

Exciting days lie ahead.

I
  • iangilmour
  • Author
  • August 1, 2017
@david_r Damn that is good!

 

 

I'm a developer so I'm guessing there are some big under the hood changes to achieve this but if this can be segregated don't wait for 2018 for that feature (in minute 41 of the video)! That is a total game changer. Running for a point is amazing, so is the quick data preview and data compare! This will speed up workflow creation so much.

 

 

I hope this works with FeatureReaders as well as readers as more often than not they are more useful as can be triggered in the middle of a transform.
I
  • iangilmour
  • Author
  • August 1, 2017
@redgeographics thanks for that comment.

 

This is what I had been doing but annoying to have to enable/disable when dealing with lots of readers.

 

I
  • iangilmour
  • Author
  • August 1, 2017
@aaronkoning thanks for the feedback :)

 

redgeographics
VIP
Forum|alt.badge.img+63
It can be a bit of a drag, yes. You could make user parameters of them, which would give you the benefit of having them all together in one place, but that's not that much of an improvement.

 

 

FME rocks! \m/
I
  • iangilmour
  • Author
  • August 1, 2017
@daleatsafe thanks for the response. I think I'll have to wait until 2017.1 goes stable as I'm in a multi-user production environment so I can't force everyone onto it.

 

In pre-2017.1 'run with full Inspection' is in no way fast to open results so very much looking forward to this coming out.

 

I
  • iangilmour
  • Author
  • August 1, 2017
@redgeographics no that is a great idea.. I use parameters everywhere but for some reason I had not thought of that. Thanks :D

 

redgeographics
VIP
Forum|alt.badge.img+63
You're welcome!

 

 

FME rocks! \m/
fmelizard
Safer
Forum|alt.badge.img+22
  • fmelizardSafer
  • Safer
  • August 1, 2017
All your dreams will come true. Well, at least we're working towards that in FME 2018...

 

 

fmelizard
Safer
Forum|alt.badge.img+22
  • fmelizardSafer
  • Safer
  • August 1, 2017
You won't have long to wait. FME 2017.1 will be out in the next few hours. While it won't be quite as fantastic as what we've got planned for FME 2018, I'm very hopeful you'll notice a good improvement with FME 2017.1 in terms of opening up the individual link stores in the data inspector. And if you don't, we'll want to know. Thanks for the encouragement.

 

 

srg
Forum|alt.badge.img+10
  • srg
  • August 2, 2017
@daleatsafe Please add me to the list of "affected party". With 2017.1 released, I am eager to see how the performance has improved in FME Data Inspector

 

 

debbiatsafe
Safer
Forum|alt.badge.img+22
  • debbiatsafeSafer
  • Safer
  • March 12, 2019

This idea has been implemented for FME Desktop 2019.0 as Visual Preview. You will now be able to preview caches directly in the Visual Preview window of Workbench If you have Feature Caching enabled.

Should this feature or its implementation not address your concerns, related to this Idea posting, please let us know by leaving a comment.

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