Shape the future of FME with your ideas
Open ideas have been reviewed by our Customer Success team and are open for commenting and voting.
We heavily use Automation Tagging to "describe" contents of the automation (e.g. which day of the week it runs, whan during day - in the evening, during night, early morning etc). With current UI it is possible to add/delete tags only, they remain in the order when they have been added. In some cases it would be useful to change the order of the tags, as in most cases currently the best idea is to delete all of them and add from scratch.
Slice solids with surfaces
When you use Zoom to Selected Feature in the Data Inspector, it seems to zoom in or out to some per-determined zoom level (some factor of the dataset extents?) However it would be much more useful to keep your current zoom level, ArcGIS Pro works like this and it works better IMHO.
Now AttributeExposer can only add each attribute name manually.but in many cases,There are some rules for the attributes name that needs to be exposed.Therefore I suggest that add wildcards and regular expression support to AttributeExposer.
E.g. dynamically exposing attributes to the workflow like this:
See this discussion. It would be useful if the url of FME Flow is available in an Automation as an attribute, just like it is available as a parameter in Workspace
A bit of a pipe dream, probably not possible to implement and for the most part there are workarounds, however, having some kind of compatibility mode would really help as a consultant / solution provider.When working with a large number of customers all of which have a different version of FME you need to make sure you have a lot of versions of FME installed to cater to all of them.This is mostly fine, however, with each release of FME the Installation grows in size, and, depending on the size of your disk it puts a cap on the number of different Installations you can have. If, however, I could always work with the latest version of FME (and take advantage of all the nice UI upgrades and things like workspace compare and merge like in FME 2023+) then it would really streamline the development process. Expected behaviour:When opening an old workspace in a newer version of FME a prompt asks if you'd like to open in compatibility mode.Compatibility mode would essentially be a restricted version of FME - formats and transformers would be limited to the appropriate versions etc.Saving a workspace in while in compatibility mode would enable a workspace to be opened up in that version. An option with new workspace to set the compatibility version. It should be noted that there would likely be sometimes differences in behaviour when actually running the workspace so warnings need to be put in place and the authors need to know the limitations. This perhaps would likely end up being a showstopper for some.Another benefit would be when the FME Server version is older than then your FME Desktop version. This means the feature would not only benefit solution providers but also users who work with an FME server in a rigid IT infrastructure with slow upgrade cycles. It would be acceptable if this functionality only supported a limited number of previous versions.Being able to reduce the number of FME installations and being able to use some new UI features would be a real benefit.
It would be great if FME 2022 supports read/writer CityGML 3.0https://docs.ogc.org/guides/20-066.html
Pdf page formatter in 2015.0 Is a good start. The fields need to receive params and atttibutes please. And the frames should be allowed to have overlap and different page_units extents. For the time being can pipe the layout and marginalia through one and the map frame and scale bars and insets through others and it should work. But would like to use attributes in the PDF transformer instead of values.
When using the GeometryReplacer sometimes the coordinate system isn’t defined - for example with GeoJSON. It would be nice to have an optional field to define the coordinate system at the same time as replacing it. A geometry replacer followed by CoordianteSytemSetter is fun, just would be neater to have it bundled together
PDF/Word documents have the ability to create form fields for users to fill in. Looking for the ability to auto-populate some or all of these fields from a database record. Ideally, the writer would accept a template .docx or .pdf and allow the field from the database to write to a field in the form.
Writing data to IFC at the moment in FME is a little bit of guesswork because the target schema is so focused as to what is "allowed in". With formats like GPX, when you add the Writer it lays down for you the permissable FeatureType names and attributes, giving you at least a starting point and an indication that calling a layer "Bob" or "Test1" isn't going to get you too far.In the short term it strikes me that perhaps a template that helps to show how to set Names, Traits and Geometry Names might be a good starting point.
I'm frequently asked if it's possible to setup FME Desktop with some default configuration e.g. Proxies, Shared folders, database connection file locations, window layout, transformer versions turned on, number of recent workspaces set to 10 etc... and then save that off as a config file that can be deployed to other installations of FME Desktop in an organisation. Currently the closest option to this is a silent install, or packaging FME, but that's much more of an admin overhead.It feels like with 2019's ability to save presets in Transformers we're going in the right direction, so here's a suggestion along the same theme that will help organisations with more than a couple of installations of FME Desktop.
It would be convenient when moving FME Desktop installation from an old machine to a new one if there was a functionality to backup/restore FME Options configuration, especially regarding Database/Web Connections.
I'd like other users to see schedules and connections but not to change.Now there is "None" or "Full Access" (edit/delete) options only (unlike Read, Write, Remove for Topics, Subscriptions, etc.) per schedule/connection. A "Visible" or similar option would be really helpful.There are shared connections that I would promote to use but not to changed (same as in Desktop). Similarly schedules are OK to be visible for reference but shouldn't be editable to anyone.
I think it would be beneficial if there was a fourth option for Severity Level in the Logger, perhaps called LOGGER, and to go along with this a filter button in the Translation Log window. That way we would have the option to view all logs just from the loggers that have this option set.Thoughts?
I noticed the Help window is missing in FME 2025.1 Workbench. Is it the same mistake as FME 2016, or am I missing something?
If you are creating the Request URL dynamically, it would be helpful to have the computed URL as one of the attributes in the Output and Rejected ports… particularly the latter port so that you can include it in any error messages you may construct.
According to safe: Tthe user parameters behave a little bit differently inside a custom transformer. They are in fact prefixed with the name of the custom transformer to avoid collisions with the main workspace parameters. Example: if you have a custom transformer called "custtransf" with a published parameter called "custparam", you will have to refer to it like this.value = FME_MacroValues["custtransf_custparam"] The issue is that a user can change the name of the custom transformer in the main canvas, or could have multiple copies ("custtransd_2") and the reference breaks. Ideally I would like to just refer to the user parameter without prefixing anything, and have FME figure it out when interpreting the python. If that's not possible, then having the ability to insert a "transformer name" into the python call would also work. value = FME_MacroValues[transformerName + "_custparam"]
The ArcGIS Online Connector is a great tool for simple and bulk data workflows for ESRI portals (AGOL and AGE). It covers many workflows from bulk actions, data maintenance, metadata and item detail maintenenace, but there are workflows that are limited to using the HTTPCaller and the rest of ArcGIS Rest APIs.Use Cases:Complex migration and portal Backup workflows that require both ArcGISOnline Connector and the HTTPCaller transformers to complete. Mutiple step up portal migrations (dev-stg-prod) or moving items from one portal to another (e.g. ENT to AGOL) To help simplify these complex workflows getting the format parameters like Org URL from an Action Item that calls self/ is valuable. If we have this capability a user can parameterize the Web connection to run multiple portal Org accounts whether its AGOL or AGE.If I parameterize Use case a above, my User parameter dialog would look like below. The top drop down for my HTTPCaller and the bottom one for my ArcGISOnline Connector. While the ArcGISOnline Connector returns this org URL as a format parameter, I need to run an Action Item like List, Upload to expose this. Here’s the reference to self:https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/users-groups-and-items/portal-self/
This was actually raised by @ctredinnick and I think it makes a lot of sense.The FME log files in both Flow and Form are great for finding out what went on with a process. But wouldn’t it be great if you could load the Log file into Form against the same workspace and see the numbers coming from each port. Visually, it could help pinpoint issues in the flow of features quickly, subsequent to the run, and would be especially useful for Flow logs.
If a user changes the Connection Storage to FME Flow some challenges need to be solved.Every time the user wants to add a new (Web) Connection which FME Flow doesn’t know, it can’t be added because the Service Definition need to be uploaded first.For example, on a completely new FME Flow only three Web Services are available. If the user wants to add a Dropbox Connection it is not possible at all and the Web Service dropdown stays empty [1].For now to upload the Service Definition the user has to change the Connection Storage back to Local Storage and choose one of the following wayscreate a connection for this type and upload it to FME Flow upload just the Service Definition to FME Flow via FME FormAfter that the user needs to change the Connection storage back to FME Flow. Idea:Add the functionality toupload the Service Definition if it doesn’t exist on FME Flow directly in the creation process for a new Connection, so that if a new Connection will be created it will automatically upload the Service Definition in the backgroundorstore the details in the background and upload these during the Publishing Wizard if it will be necessary for the process to run on FME Flow[1]
It would be great to have an option to add one more input port to this transformer.In some scenarios, it's useful to differentiate between two input datasets—so that the transformer can overlay one dataset against the other, without comparing a dataset against itself.
The Safe Software Product Team is actively looking at the possibility of adding support for B-Spline geometry natively to the FME Geometry Model.Currently, we read in BSpline Curves in FME from MicroStation DGN files for example, by stroking the B-Spline into line segments, which FME then store as lines, which might not be what you want in your output if your target format or system does support this geometry natively. Currently B-Splines are read as stroked lines. Image markup is only an example for visualizing. Are you someone who uses AutoCAD DWG, MicroStation DGN, IFC files or other formats/systems where you encounter B-Spline curves? Do you care about bézier and NURBS curves (but really, do you?)? If any of the above sounds like you, especially about B-Splines, please drop us a comment if you’d be open to being contacted to provide feedback and early testing!
Would more users like to see an option or prefer if the feature information window sorted exposed attributes in alphabetical order? Currently, the attributes are sorted by table order.
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