Shape the future of FME with your ideas
Open ideas have been reviewed by our Product Management and are open for commenting and voting.
Currently the ListRenamer New Name parameter can only be hardcoded. It would be nice if the new name can reference attributes or parameters, or even better have access to to the full text editor.
I'd never bothered reporting this before as I'd always assumed someone at Safe would notice. Why is Background Color under View > Background Color, whereas Background Map is under Tools > FME Options > Background Color?
I have noticed that FME tends to be installed to C:appsFME. If you are installing several versions you could easily overwrite the previous installation. I think it would be useful to add release number to installation folder, say C:appsFME2017
Folder Agent (http://www.folderagent.com is a Free program that allows active folder watching for files and folders then allows you to apply multiple manipulations to the file or folder.
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.
One of my concern is the stability of the Data Inspector. It is by far not as stable as the old Universal Viewer. This is caused by, in my opinion, data having no coordinate system attached. Won't it be a good idea to have a "default coordinate system" setting for data without a CS? I hope this would make Data Inspector a lot more useable.
Can we have a transformer for detecting similarity between geometries? This post may be a good starting point: https://lin-ear-th-inking.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/computing-geometric-similarity.html
Similar to this idea ( https://knowledge.safe.com/content/idea/19290/two-input-port-ordered-by-group-asynchronously.html - which I still really need to be able to optimise many workspaces), it would be good if the FeatureMerger could handle Join On fields that come in synchronously (Note: Join On, not Group By - assume Group By is empty for this example), but not grouped as All Suppliers, then All Requesters. Currently if I have this input: Requester_id = 1 ....Supplier_id = 1 Requester_id = 2 ....Supplier_id = 2 And so FeatureMerger will cache the both Request and Supplier entirely before doing the merges; a massive problem for anything more than a medium sized dataset, and makes quite a few workspaces effectively impossible. I guess a cardinality parameter like DatabaseJoiner has could be used, but that's optional. This would make a lot of workspaces for any large datasets actually workable. Currently I spend a lot of time splitting up datasets in overly-complex ways so that I can process them in chunks to work around memory limits.
Possibility of copy a parameter and paste it in public or private tab, editing it in order to create a new parameter using the same information.
On a 3-point arc I'd really like a way to retrieve the Mid Point. The data is visible in the Data Inspector, but there doesn't seem to be a way to retrieve it outside of Python.The Transformer that I would've expected to help me here would be the ArcPropertyExtractor. As shown below, it contains most of the arc properties, however the Mid Point is not one of them.The Center property is the center of the circle on which the arc is based, i.e. not the Mid Point halfway on the arc.Not all arcs are 3-point arcs, so I can imagine giving a calculated value or leaving the attribute empty for non-3-point arcs.
Ref this post: https://knowledge.safe.com/questions/40520/write-sketchup-with-colors.html It would be nice if FME translated from RenderingOptions.GroundColorRGB -> fme_color on reading of Sketchup, and the other way when writing to Sketchup
MongoDB (from "humongous") is an open-source document database, and the leading NoSQL database. Written in C++
It would be very useful to get what version is being used to execute a pythoncaller when using for example the arcpy library. Is is therefore possible to add this information to the macroValues provided in the module fme? example. fme.macroValues['FME_VERSION'] = 32bit Example of situation in which it would be useful: https://knowledge.safe.com//questions/40448/how-to-determine-whether-the-current-fme-is-32bit.html
Let's say that I have hundreds of jobs in the FME Server queue and that these jobs notify a specific topic (JOB_FAILED) on failure.If I publish a workspace to the Notification service (subscribing to the JOB_FAILED topic), the triggered workspace will be placed in the queue at lowest priority letting me know that there is an issue only when all my jobs already queued are completed.Currently, I can work around this by appending &tm_priority=10 to the target URL of the push subscription but I have to do this manually each time I publish the workspace.
I would like to monitor how often a workspace is run. This helps to understand usage. This would be great to see in the Dashboard.
It would be useful if there was more support for accepting files that had unicode characters in them. An easy work around is to simply rename your source files to be processed and then map them back to the desired name afterwards, but that shouldn't be necessary.Currently, some files with unicode in their name are simply rejected with a source file is not valid message.
I'd like the option in the date formatter to choose whether to Create New Attribute or Overwrite the existing Attribute, similar to that in the Expression Evaluator.
In FME Server the UNC path permissions come from the account running the Engine service. It would be interesting if optionally the permissions could come from the Active Directory users.
There's scope for improvement of the Change Detector. It's only version 1, so I don't think it's something that has received any real love since its creation. This is particularly surprising given it's a fairly highly used transformer at #62Suggestions (probably not all feasible): Group By Parallelism (workspace optimisation) Original/Revised first (workspace optimisation)Input is ordered by.... (workspace optimisation) Pairing - like Group By - one original feature should match one revised feature and then the changes compared between them. Potentially in combination with some of the above, this could also allow comparison of features without needing to store them all first.Split the dialog up so that the attribute stuff is all together and the geometry stuff is all together. Currently it's all mushed together. * Following from last item, disable "geometry" portion of dialog if only attribute matching. And disable attribute section if only geometry matching. (as standard in other dialogs).
Currently looping with blocking transformers is only allowed in linked custom transformers. (see http://knowledge.safe.com/articles/1273/looping-with-blocking-transformers.html)However there are transformers that force a linked rather than embedded custom transformer are only blocking if they have a Group By, or other parameter setting that causes them to block.It would be nice if these transformers could be used in an embedded loop when they are not in "blocking-mode"ex. Bufferer (No Group By), AreaAmalgamtor (Self-Amalgamation Mode), PythonCaller (Function)
The rejected port functionality showing the red circle and number and allow for features to be inspected on Desktop transformers has been of great benefit.However there is currently no way to add this functionality to a Rejected port in a custom transformer. Instead, a port created for "rejected" features in a custom transformer requires a connection to be fully aware that something was rejected. Any chance for the option for "Insert Transformer Rejected Output"?
I encountered an issue when I started with a shapefile line feature which held on to it's format attribute SHAPE_GEOMETRY as being an arc even though I had used the buffer it and area on area overlay transformers during the workbench. I took me an age to figure out why it wasn't writing out as area features despite everything else within FME told me they were in fact areas: inspector showing the features as areas, was able to calculate the areas of each feature, my features were definitely areas! Eventually I found the SHAPE_GEOMETRY format attribute (is this new?) and found this doesn't update throughout the workbench automatically. Once I changed this using an attribute_creator to shp_polygon the problem was fixed. I'm not sure why this has just started happening (I've never had this issue in the past) but if Safe if you could update this in one way or another that would be much appreciated.
It is not possible to read an attribute from a text file, and to evaluate in the AttributCreator.Example:Attribut A with Value "Some text @Value(fme_feature_tpye) some more text". If the text in the editor of the AttributCreator entered, it works of course. But I read the text from a text file (AttributeFileReader).@Evaluate(@Value(A)) delivers the desired result as error message as attribut likeFailed to evaluate numeric expression 'Some text my_feature_type some more text'. Result is set to null.It would be useful if a function @Result directly returns the result.
More "watchers" like Google Drive Watcher, S3 Watcher, Dropbox Watcher... etc.
In the FeatureReader, one does have the possibility to filter features based on a WHERE-clause and based on a Spatial filter.It would be very helpful in specific situations when there is an extra dropdown list in between those with options 'AND' & 'OR' allowing to select all those features which match a spatial filter AND / OR the where clause.
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