Shape the future of FME with your ideas
Open ideas have been reviewed by our Product Management and are open for commenting and voting.
We need a way to extract the properties of a coordinate system, such as the units. There is at least one custom transformer I found on HUB (CoordinateSystemMapUnitExtractor) but I think the capability to extract properties and use this data in the workspace logic should be available as a simple to use transformer, right OOTB. You can find more discussion on this here (specifically to the Units property, but it should apply to others).
Named Connections for databases and webservices is really useful.It allows authors of FME Workspaces to separate sensitive information into "environment configuration" that in the case of publishing to FME Server also becomes manageble in terms of authorization. It's often the case that the logic of an FME Workspace needs to be spread to a wider group than the sensitive information.By physically separating these, there's less risk of the sensitive information being saved where it should not. However, there are times when Named Connections cannot be used because they are to specialized towards specific applications.This is where this concept would have its role. Named Values should work in the same manner as Named Connections but be very generic on the kind of value that is managed.Probably, the managed value should in fact only be a string value. Access to Named Value would probably have to be implemented as some kind of macro substitution or function call. Some keys to being useful as a concept:It should be available to use anywhere in a WorkspaceIt should be available to use in all stages of the execution of a Workspace (before, parsetime, runtime, after...)It should be documented clearly how not to use it, e.g. assign as an attribute to a FME Feature.In my opinion related ideas:https://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000TlQqQAK/detailhttps://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000TkjuQAC/detailhttps://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000TlGpQAK/detailhttps://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000TlBAQA0/detailhttps://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000Tkv6QAC/detailhttps://community.safe.com/s/idea/0874Q000000Tl9DQAS/detail
Currently if you set up a Feature Writer to write to a Text File the text_line_data attribute is automatically populated and not editable. However, this means that is not highlighted green or red depending on whether it exists or not. The FeatureWriter should alert in some way if this attribute does not exist, as it's fairly important for the Text File writer :-)There's also no warning in the translation log to say the attribute does not exist.
Same option like the ListConcatenator (Drop Empty and Null Elements) for the Aggregator. So the output strings, when using many columns, is clean in one transformation step.
The possibility to create a webhook through the FME Server interface is great, but when choosing the parameters I miss the Advanced parameters which you had in the Run Workspace form: You can always add the Job Directives tm_ttc, tm_ttl and so on (https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Server_Documentation/ReferenceManual/Job_Directives.htm) to the webhook manually, but it's not so obvious and I don't think every user knows this directives
It would be great if the PythonCaller could get access to FME named connections, even in an obfuscated manner, for use in connecting to web sites and databases. For example, making a web connection available in the PythonCaller as a requests.auth object for use by the "requests" module for HTTP requests: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/authentication/
The issue is a security one related to workspaces accessing network drives, particularly when run as jobs on FME Server. Rather than having a service account run a separate engine with access to specific network resources, why not allow named connections for network resources in workspaces for more fine-grained control of the security of these resources.
While the csv reader can have a delimiter specified, it would be great if a setting was introduced that would allow the CSV Reader to guess the delimiter of the supplied file (just in the same way generic reader can guess a format). This way the similar files using different delimiters could be read without the CSV delimiter needing to be pasted by early processing to guess the delimiter.
There is no possibility to activate a topic on cancellation. This can happen if the 'queue or job expiry time' exceeds their time or someone cancelled the job by accident. Jobs can exceed due to occupied engines, expired licences, bigger than normal dynamic input datasets (or even bad scripting).
It would be really useful if the Choice (multiple) and its "alias" counterpart parameters could output comma-separated strings at the user's request, rather than just space-separated. Useful for including in SQL-like IN tests without further manipulation
A useful addition to FME Desktop would be the use of a non-acting terminator - effectively just an indicator to show that you have considered the output port in question and have determined that there is no need to connect it to anything else or do anything else with it. This could be a small discrete symbol (diamond, stop sign, etc) in place of the right-pointing triangle or just the removal of the triangle itself.
Please create a parameter to allow the USA / Canadian grid transformation for NAD27/NAD83 to be defined at the workspace level.This article:https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Server_Documentation/AdminGuide/Configuring-Datum-Shifts.htmexplains various methods of configuring FME to work with USA and Canadian grid shift files. However, the company I'm working for routinely works with both USA and Canadian data, so it's not practical to set this value for all of FME. Rather than performing a manual CSMapReproject everywhere it's needed in the workspace, it would be great if it was possible to define the grid shift file to be used just once for an entire workspace, via a workspace parameter.
CUT and FILL volume calculation between Existing surface dem with Planned surface dem.
Certain characters are not allowed when creating files & folders in the OS. So if you pick data from some source and then use it to create files/folders without any validation, there's a good chance things will fail because of these special characters (see below for an example in Windows). It would be great to have a string function and transformer that will clean up a string to ensure it is compliant with these restrictions (maybe a way to also map to whether certain characters are just removed vs. replaced with a character such as an underscore, etc.). Currently this is doable with a series of nested ReplaceString or ReplaceRegEx functions for example, but not as easy to format each time you need to do this. This function & "cleaner" transformer would simplify such tasks and ensure you have no failures in your translations and data writing tasks.
ArcGIS Field Maps and Workforce support URL-driven app launching, see this topic. Workbench should be able to generate app links and then send them by email or other message.
for an output table (in my case esri sde) could you add the option to "Truncate - Create if Needed" i seem to come across this need somewhat often
It would be nice to have a transformer that produces Plant UML sequence diagrams.The potential source could be :attribute or parameterfile/url orfme workbenchPlant UML uses plain text to generate proffesional looking sequence diagrams as well as other diagrams.
It would be nice to have an "open containing folder" button to open the log file folder similar to that available on the writer feature types.
It would be great if the "Run to this" / "Run from this" options within a workspace could be extended to have a "force run" or "rerun" option. Feature caching is fairly smart and will re-run stale caches when required. The problem is when an underlying dataset has changed and the feature caches aren't aware.For example, when using a FeatureReader or DatabaseJoiner, the underlying data may have changed and, currently, the only way to get the workspace to pick this up is to either re-run the entire workspace, or make a temporary edit in the workspace that causes the cached data to become stale.Another scenario in which this is an issue is if a custom transformer is updated, then the main workspace feature caches do not account for this unless the custom transformer interface changes.
No account yet? Create an account
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.