Shape the future of FME with your ideas
Open ideas have been reviewed by our Product Management and are open for commenting and voting.
IdeaWhen using Python, return FME_MacroValues["ParameterName"] as an object instead of a string, so we can access both the value and the definition of the Published/Private Parameter.Why would this be helpful?It allows us to see if the parameter was Private, Public and/or Optional.We can see what the Default Value is. It can be handy to have this value in case the Python code needs to resort to another solution if the value that the user entered produces the wrong result.We can get a nice descriptive name of the parameter (from the Prompt field), so we can create nice log messages are another kind of user feedback to tell that a parameter value is wrong for instance.We could read the Configuration for a Choice parameter for instance, in the same order in which the choices are specified in the Definition dialog. Then, we could check if the parameter value is equal to a configuration list item by index, so that we no longer need to hardcode all the choice values in the PythonCaller if we want to run a different function for each choice for instance. This reduces the risk of breaking the code if we change one of the choice values in the Parameter Definition Dialog. It would only still break (or give unexpected results) if we would change the order of the choices, but that I can live with.If we have an object anyway, there might also be an additional property inside that tells us what native Python type the parameter value can be converted to. Or better yet, simply return the parameter value as a Python type...
This would for instance be usefull when dealing with XML, JSON or rasterdata from API's. Kind of like how the RasterReplacer transformer offers this functionality for rasterdata. Of course there is the option of writing to a temporary file (TempPathnameCreator - AttributeFileWriter) and then reading it in from the (temporary) filepath, but I think a direct implementation in the FeatureReader would be nicer (and maybe also a bit more efficient, since you already have the data as a blob).
***Note from Migration:*** Original Title was: Warn when resolving ArcGIS Domains if code (value) not found in Domain (FGDB/ArcSDE) For example when reading a File Geodatabase or ArcSDE layer.It is possible for a field in a layer to contain a value that doesn't match a code (value in FME speak) in the Domain. For example your Domain has:1 = Car2 = Bus3 = TrainBut the Vehicle field for some features in your layer have the value "4" in the actual data. Even worse, the value in the data might be "Car" which makes it almost impossible to figure out that ArcGIS is showing the raw data and not displaying "Car" by looking up "1" in the Domain.When you read the data into FME (whether you use the FGDB Open API Reader or the ArcGIS Reader), you will get an empty string for any values such as "4" that aren't in the Domain. This is because FME will look up the actual value from the data and not find it in the Domain.I would like to suggest that if this happens, the Log file should record a Warning or Error to say something like "WARN: code '4' not found in Domain 'Vehicle_type'".
The new Era, the new FME Form, it would be nice if the maximum number of concurrent translation processes would be increased, or unlimited ideally.
Setting the number of standard engines requested is not intuitive. There is a sub-job running on engine A:3. In this case, the standard setting is actually 3 on host A and 2 on host B. This is the edit page of requested engines - why is 4 shown on host A and what is the effect if i change it to 3 in this case?(FME Flow 2023.2.1)
To date, when I have maintained hosted feature layers in ArcGIS Online or Enterprise, I have frequently used a change detection approach and written the delta transaction. This can result in some minutes during which the service is in flux,especially if the service is large and takes time to read into however many ChangeDetector transformers are needed. It is also possible some writes fail.In a webinar I watched today, the presenter demonstrated a workflow that wraps functionality available to swap the layer source for a hosted feature layer view. This has a managerial advantage in that a candidate replacement set of data can be curated and tested alongside the production data, and a performance advantage in that swapping a layer service view’s source is faster than any other transaction approach.As the ArcGISOnlineConnector uses the administrative ArcGIS REST API under the covers I propose a new Action for the transformer: “View Source Swap” that lets you pick the target view and replacement service, checks the requirements are met then does the swap.
Hi, in FME Flow 2023.2.1 you can´t disable an Active Period once it was successfully created. If you like to disable an Active period but keep the configuration (like a repeat on interval config), you need to remove it or adjust the start/end date.It would be more helpful to enable/disable an Active Period like it is done in the Job Routing / Engine Assignment rule / Schedule / Automation.
I love inspecting my data using the inspector. It is very powerful, but it would be much more useful if there was a data editing tool included with it. I am sure that this would be very helpful for many people.
With REST web services, generally they return JSON/XML, which I then need to manipulate into attributes.The pattern of work is often: Add Creator, HTTPCaller, Logger/InspectorRun workspaceInspect returned JSON/XML - determine if need to fragment and flatten or only flatten.Add JSONFragmenter or JSONFlattener or XML equivalent and Logger/Inspector.Run workspace.Inspect attributes created from flattening.Expose attribute names that were created by flattening.I wish this was less work.
Please evaluate to add a variable in fmeserver that contains the useremail from the logged user if present in the useraccount table. Is useful to send mail directly to the user. Thank you.
We are seeing some agencies replacing FTP with Citrix ShareFile services. It will be handy for FME desktop and server to write to ShareFile.
If I ask OpenAI to give me GeoJSON defining a box around a city or a point location I get a pretty good result. It saves looking for a dataset etc. Let's add AI Assist to the transformer.
Be able to choose Add as FeatureReader instead of the Regular reader when dragging dropping files into FME Workbench:
Allow the split of the main window into 2 windows to look at different places from the same workspace at the same time (like in Excel). Could be really useful when working with big workspace.
It would be a time saver when you can move and drop an existing Reader (the child) onto the FeatureReader so that the Reader-feature is added to the FeatureReader using all settings of the original Feature. This is specifically the case with WMS- and WFS- features when you have to type long URI's and make many different settings.
I would be keen for a "Annotation Default" in workbench options that would control whether annotation was on/off by default when opening a workbench (defaulted to on of course). I would just like to open workbenches and see a clean bookmarked interface, which I could quickly turn on annotation if I needed too.
To add the capability to turn OFF/ON bookmarks the same way it is done with Annotations
When running a FME workbench in a production setting, it would be nice to have the Inspector Transformer set as a configurable parameter when running it from command prompt with the fme executable. This avoids editing the Workbench file and helps in quicker deployments.
Earlier today (and I've done this before), I forgot to disable a Data Inspector in a workspace. I called the Workspace 600 times via WorkspaceRunners, which resulted in the Data Inspector opening 600 times!My idea is to add a transformer parameter to the WorkspaceRunner that toggles the workspace setting, Enable/Disable Inspectors (I would disable by default).Amit
Reorder the canvas or tabs of the work bench . Currently my workbench tab/canvas order Start/Main/CustomerTransformer3/CustomTranformer2/CustomTranformer7 i want it like Start/Main/CustomerTransformer1/CustomTranformer2/CustomTranformer3 etc.
Currently the user has to convert partial data flows in a large scale workflow to custom transformers in order to prevent too cluttering Main canvas tab. It's a good practice, but there are some limitations in custom transformers. e.g. cannot place readers and writers, cannot access user parameters defined in the Main Navigator, etc.It might be wonderful if the Main workflow could be separated into multiple canvas tabs: Main-1, Main-2, Main-3 ....Maybe looks like custom transformers, but those are parts of the Main workflow, share the same Navigator contents. The features move between those tabs through the "wormholes" with no overhead.
Additional viewing windows/monitors to make quick view to crucial workspace area. Specially useful for large parametrized workspaces. User can collect in one place many quick views to improve debugging. Maybe as a kind of bookmarks enhancement.
Safe current puts out a What's New change log as a txt file, that lists the accumulated changes from the last official release.If one is a several releases behind, then we need to dig through several different text files to see all the changes. Oftimes we are only interested in changes to a few transformers.It would be nice to have an interactive changelog that can be set to compare specific builds.ex. all the changes from 2015.1.3.1 Build 15573 to 2016.1.1 Build 16609.It would be even nicer if it could be filtered to show only changes to a specific format or transformer.ex. the BuffererThis is particularly useful when attempting to debug why a workspace has changed behaviour between versions. ie authored in version X, produces different results in version Y.It is also helpful to determine whether to upgrade to a new release and/or identify workspaces that potentially may need to be adapted to the latest release.
I find my self doing this manual process a bunch where I like to have output ports on the TestFilter named by cached values of a particular attribute and a simple test condition on that attribute. This helps visually understand and present workflows. for example if we are doing feature routing based on an attribute value. It would be very nice to have a tool in the TestFilter that auto populates output port based on an attribute value and at the same time add a test condition for that attribute to each main row of the TestFilter. This kind of relates to another idea to have the TestFilter save the value of an output port to an new attribute.
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