Shape the future of FME with your ideas
Open ideas have been reviewed by our Product Management and are open for commenting and voting.
I like to display a description of what a workspace does in annotation. The workspace parameters already have a place to input a description (e.g. Overview property in 2017.1), but that is not nearly as visible as annotation. It would be helpful if annotation could be created that is dynamically linked to workspace parameters, such that if I update the text in the annotation the corresponding workspace parameter is updated, and vice versa.
A possible way to improve working with FME Workspaces and informing the end-users about changes.Documenting the workspaces with Bookmarks and Annotations is the first step in creating a well documented workspace. But what if you want a better way to work, and save all the minor changes you do every day? And find back to a previous version? Also if you share the same workspace with more colleagues either through Github or through a shared drive? Can we benefit more by working a bit more similar by looking to our coders even if we are non-code people? YES!We also want to inform all the end users of our workspaces / FME Server workspaces / Gallery apps of any changes we have made with the workspace. NOT with a separate word-document we have prepared and they have to look at. NOT by sending an e-mail and say: Hey, we have added a new format. But within the actual workspace itself.A suggestion to Safe Software to consider would be like this?1. Start FME Workbench2. Select Workspace you want to work with3. Get pop-up:a. What are you doing today? Enter short description: For instance (Check errors when writing to Shape)4. Open workbench and you have a new textfield floating on the top left cornver of the canvas5. When you have “found and fixed” what you should (should only take 5min – 1 hour is) hit SAVE button and a new pop-up. Prefilled with the text already enteretd:6. This will now be saved in the workspace “History- which few people use?”. And you now have a good track history of the changes. 7. When published on FME Server the last change (and older) can be showcased on the Run Workspace:And also on the FME Server Apps side.
In some Workspaces there are critical comments which should popup when opening the workbench-File.E.g. "Don't upgrade Linejoiner in this Workspace"
***Note from Migration:*** Original Title was: Option to force workspace description to popup when closing a workspace (after changes) Would love to see an option that allows you to force a popup of the workspace parameter descriptions when closing a workspace/workbench. Option would be saved in the workspace and only for the ones you need too and when there are (meaningful) content changes made within this workspace.This would help in keeping track of the Overview, help and most importantly the History.
It would be nice to have a summary annotation like functionality for the workspace history parameter
When initially clicking on the magnifying glass to inspect features, it would be great to default to zoom-extents. Once you have located your view, this orientation could persist when clicking on additional feature inspectors. Currently, you are able to do this only after adjusting the view of each transformer but it easily reverts and you have to redo. Very often I activate the preview and see nothing until zooming out.
I had an idea this morning, and thought I'd post it here instead of just filing it with our developers, see what you all think.The idea is: annotation for dialogs.i.e. when you open a transformer parameters dialog you can right-click on it and choose Attach Annotation. Such annotation works the same way as on the canvas, except that it only appears when the parameters dialog is open.Benefits? 1) It promotes more annotation specific to parameters 2) You might move some annotation from the transformer to here, clearing the canvasThoughts? I quite like it.
It would be great if there was the ability to add annotations for each line in an AttributeCreator/AttributeManager. Either as an additional description column or within the Text/Arithmetic editor as commented out text. Once you start having nested functions it can get quite difficult to unpick and if there are many attributes being trying to detail it all in an annotation attached to the transformer can be quite unwieldy.
In complex condition statements it is hard to annotate. The annotations outside the transformer get messy. Especially if you have an attributeManager with a lot of conditional values.Inline annotations would help so much , like a simple column (e.g. in testFilter the portnames) for some small comments.
I'd like to suggest the ability to add a note/annotation within the AttributeManager (or AttributeCreator) conditional definitions, by If-statement line. This could be super helpful when testing for multiple conditions. . sometimes I lose track of what I'm testing for if the condition is complex.
It would be useful to have a 3rd column in the TestFilter dialog (as well as comparable ones such as the Conditional Values and Tester) to add comments about that particular line.
***Note from Migration:*** Original Title was: Add 'Back' and 'Forward' keyboard shortcuts to FME Help (similar to web browsers) Web browsers have Alt + RightArrow and Alt + LeftArrow assigned to Forward and Back navigation in most web browsers (Cmd instead of Alt for Mac OS Users). This would be great if the same assignments would work in the FME Help application!
In general, FME Workbench could use more keyboard shortcuts, so I'm going to post a few that I've thought of here--although I can only remember one at the moment. So here it is:AttributeValueMapper: When viewing the parameters, a keyboard shortcut for the + and - symbols would be great. I just imported some source and destination values from a spreadsheet, but I need to delete a bunch of them. I can't seem to select multiple rows to delete, so I have to click the (-) button about 200 times.
There is a "open containing folder" shortcut (ctrl + o in windows) but I would like to have a shortcut which opens the containing folder of the selected output file/writer. (now I right click and choose Open Containing Folder)
Using Python in PythonCaller or Python scripts of parameters does not allow easy commenting of code by calling a shortcut/hotkey on a block of code yet. This is possible in other IDE's such as Visual Studio Code with CTRL + /. Currently there is a workaround by putting # in front of every code row, but this can be quite tedious if you want to comment out a whole block of code with 20 rows.
The Message type user parameter will currently only accept a plain text string. It would be very handy (especially when used to build web apps) if you could incorporate hyperlinks and other rich text options into this string. Very much like you can in this description field...This idea was developed whilst creating a webinar on Conditional Visibility Parameters for 1Spatial UK.
The "Message" user parameter type in the Manage User Parameters dialog currently accepts nothing but straight, typed-in, static text in its text window. Please have the text window operate as the usual FME full text editor window. That way one could enter user parameters, i.e., in $(parameter_name) format, as part of the message text. In many of my workspaces, I create scripted parameters that hold default pathnames to output files, and I routinely use those parameters--and others, like user-chosen parameters--in other parameter definitions. If the Message type parameter could accept parameters, then I could message the user dynamically, e.g. "NOTE: Default store file (.ffs) will be: E:ProjectsDowntown Address Locator_FFSstreets_dwntwn.ffs," where the filepath comes from a user parameter, which itself could have been built in a previous scripted parameter. This capability would just allow workspaces to be just that more dynamic.
I propose to add function to allow user to Bookmark Search Envelope, so user can restore previously saved Search Envelope without manual typing or copying the MinMaxXY.
I would like to read data inside a bounding box with FeatureReader, but many times I don't have any bounding box. Thus I need to go to Data Inspector, open a dataset, pan the view to a certain place, move mouse cursor to the corners, write down the coordinates, copy the coordinates to Creator in FME Workbench and connect Creator to FeatureReader.It would be much easier, if I could create a box geometry in FME Data Inspector, and if FME Workbench would be open at the same time, I could use the box geometry straight in Creator. There could be a parameter in Creator, e.g. "Use the geometry from Data Inspector".
Using the Bounding Box published parameter allows you to test small areas your big workspaces/workflows, so I could say that is THE ONE FME capability that makes my work much more efficient ;) ... Unfortunately, I think there is a little more to be improved:I use to face this hard job of creating the corresponding User Parameter within the Search Envelope options to create a BoundingBox whereas the Workspace need to be run spatially, for one of the inputs that is included in the Workspace, and then, LINK the rest of Inputs/Readers to those four X-Y parameters.Even when you change/delete that associated bounding box Input, you need to recreate the Published Parameters and link again the rest of your inputs. Imagine a Workpsace with 6-10 readers...I was wondering if there is a possibility to establish within a Workspace an independent bounding box parameter which encapsulates/rules spatially the rest of Readers/Inputs inside, like a global Bounding Box or something like that.Thanks,
When creating multiple readers, it's not really a neat and nice process to assign the same search envelope to all of them. There are three main ways I suppose: 1) Manually input it on all of them. That's 4x input per feature reader. Copy-pasting helps obviously, but still a lot of manual input. 2) Create four user parameters with values, then link the parameters to each reader. Less writing, more clicking - still a lot of input. 3) Have a creator that creates the box and then use multiple feature readers to check for intersection. Slightly nicer, but doesn't create as good a workspace and doesn't support clipping. Neither of the above ways are really simple or satisfactory for what seems to be a straightforward approach. Instead, I suggest some kind of "link to other reader" or "copy from other reader"-solution for the bounding boxes. This way, you'd set it for one of the readers and then point the others to use the same values and settings as the first one. (Slightly inspired by https://knowledge.safe.com/idea/34353/use-a-map-driven-dialog-when-asking-users-for-boun.html which I think is a tremendous idea and a much better solution for bounding box inputs. However, it'd still be a problem for multiple readers, unless they can share search envelopes)
Sometimes data transformation should be performed for a specific geographical scope and it is already possible to prompt the user to enter min and max XY coordinates via published parameters for defining the bounding box (or search envelope). Instead of figuring out those bounds prior to running the workspace, a "search envelope" parameter linked with a background map could allow the user to draw the search envelope on a background map which would appear at runtime.
"I know I used this transformer before in one of my hundreds workflows, but which one?"I like a tool where you can search for used transformers and which returns the names and locations of the workflows. Is there allready a solution or is it not a problem?
Search and replace attribute names in a workspace, which are used inside transformers, e.g. Group By -parameters or ExpressionEvaluators.I had a huge workspace, where I had same attribute in many Group By settings of transformers. The source dataset changed to a different data model, and I had to change the attributes also to the transformers.
I have hundreds of workspaces on my FME Server and I sometimes remember that I have used certain functionality in some workspace, but I can't remember which one. For example, I was looking for a workspace where I did date and time calculation and it's not possible to check each one. I would like to be able to search the content of workspaces on FME Server.
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