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New and Open ideas are awaiting review or have been reviewed by our Product Management team, and are open for commenting and voting.
Update or merge the various style transformers (PDF, Mapinfo, CAd etc) into a style manager super transformer. Allow for importing styles from other datasets and tables as well as from json and SLD (whole map styling) and SVG + PNG (individual feature styling) files. Various agencies such as the OS use sld style files. OS Mastermap for instance would be a lot less painful in organizing styling if it were possible to open the style file up and convert data in the fme-colour and other style fields. If this information auto transferred to other writing formats then even better. If you could also preview styles within the style manager such as point markers and transparency as well as open up new style markers in SVG or PNG format then FME would start to look as powerful as GIS in terms of map creation. It would be amazing if the style manager could connect to the Mapnik rasterizer as well.
Problem: FME has hundreds of transformers, with sometimes interesting names, that can be difficult for a newer user to understand. In this scenario, we borrow from online shopping sites (like Amazon) and provide recommendations for other similar-ish transformers based on our usage stats. Hopefully users then discover "new powers" to get the job done and don't feel so lost. Hypothetical example: "Other FME users who placed a Clipper also used a FeatureMerger, Tester, and AttributeCopier." Then use the Transformer Help to port in the quick description and/or image for context (maybe that information is hidden by default?). Where and how does this information get presented? I'm not sure, but I imagine it'd get most use if in product. Whether or not it's a good idea or even feasible is something I leave for you to assess.
In FME 2016.1 RC, I found that the user has to click [Help] button or an equivalent command to access the help doc of a transformer. It's good for regular transformers, but custom transformers don't have [Help] button, so you cannot change the Help window to the help doc for a custom transformer while editing its parameters. [Defaults] button in the parameters dialog of custom transformers is useless, but [Help] button might be helpful.
Currently the HTMLReportGenerator only allows colour change of features through parameters or by the colour picker. It would be amazing to be able to asign colours and transpecnery through attributes so that features can be styled differntly.
Add support for SLD from PostGIS. Similar to when QGIS reads from a PostGIS-database it also reads the SLD Styles.
***Note from Migration:*** Original Title was: Add a Transformer to Perform Iterative Operations for List Attributes - ListIterator (tentative) The expected transformer performs iterative operations for every element of specified lists, and then stores the result into new lists or overwrites source lists by the result. The user can declare aliases of source lists and define math or string expressions through the parameters dialog, like this.The index surrounded by square brackets in the expressions indicates relative position of elements. i.e. [0] indicates every element, [<negative>] indicates a prior element, [<positive>] indicates a subsequent element. An editor similar to the Arithmetic or Text Editor can also be used to enter each expression. This transformer should support both simple list (e.g. _list{}) and complex (structured) list (e.g. _list{}.foo, _list{}.bar).Example: If the source list and non-list attributes contain these values:_list{}.foo = [1,2,3,4,5] _list{}.bar = [10,20,30,40,50] n = 1 prefix = 'P'the destination list should be:_list{}.a = [2,3,4,5,6] _list{}.b = [<null>,20,30,40,<null>] _list{}.c = [11,22,33,44,55] _list{}.d = ['001_S','002_S','003_S','004_S','005_S'] _list{}.e = ['P_101','P_202','P_303','P_404','P_505'] [Addition] It would be ideal if each expression could have "circular list" option. If the option is ON, the _list{}.b should be:_list{}.b = [26.66666...,20,30,40,33.33333...]
The File Copy Writer (already in FME) can be used to move or copy files.I use this writer quite a lot.It can be used to ZIP files too, if the destination is a ZIP file.I would like to be able to UNZIP files using this writer (source is zipped file, destination is directory to store unzipped files).
When manipulating a spatial database using SQL statements, there are many cases where the syntax requires SRID (Spatial Reference System Identifier). If you are going to use such SQL statements with the SQLExecutor, will have to find a proper SRID from a documentation. It might be convenient if there was a transformer which can be used to interpret any FME Coordinate System to the corresponding SRID.
***Note from Migration:*** Original Title was: Add a transformer like the AttributeSplitter that allows attributes to be split based on a delimeter or on a start and end index into multiple new attributes. Example:Input attribute TEST value 1,2,3,4Split based on delimiter: ,Output attributes TEST1, TEST2, TEST3, TEST4Example2:Input attribute TEST value 1,2,3,4Split based on index:start 0 end 2, new attribute TEST1 value 1,2start 3 end 6, new attribute TEST2 value ,3,4This can be done, but requires multiple transformers insequence.
The possibility to get/set individual raster cell values using the Python fmeobjects library. This would make it possible to perform e.g. advanced linear regression analysis that isn't already supported by the RasterCellValueCalculator.Exploding the raster into points using the RasterCellCoercer isn't a good alternative for larger raster datasets because of the large memory footprint.
Integration not just with Hadoop but Apache Spark in particular for reading and writing to RDD:s would be very useful for anyone with a Big Data Hadoop cluster. The machine learning algorithms and the graph database features of Spark would complement FME really well.:smiley_cat:
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