Question of the Week: What's a course you want to see in the FME Academy?

We’ve wanted to create a short “To Loop or Not to Loop” course for quite a while. Many new FME users are surprised there isn’t usually the need to create a for or while loop. Instead, FME normally handles iteration by creating more features, one feature per iteration. We have a webinar on this very topic, but one day I’d like to provide this information on the FME Academy.

One subject that I feel is a bit underrepresented in the FME Academy is raster data (last year I dove into it when creating our own Dutch training materials), or combining vector and raster. It could easily be a whole course on its own I think.

I really liked the Digital Plan Submission, but I couldn’t find it in the latest version of the FME Academy, has it been deprecated? It was a really good use case for Flow.

That’s a good idea, thanks @redgeographics. For now, we’ve tried to leave more format- and data-type-specific content in the Knowledge Base, but I do agree raster could be a good candidate for an Academy course.

Regarding the Digitial Plan Submission course, we removed that, as it had not been updated since FME 2020. It was part of an experiment to try using an FME interactive demo as the basis for a short training course. I think it worked pretty well, but we determined we did not have the internal resources to create and maintain more of those as FME Academy courses. Some of the demos are covered by Knowledge Base tutorials.

Part of my role is dealing with disaster related data. We still have a lot of senior management who ignore all the dashboards and webpages and apps we create and still want that “1 page summary” of what’s going on twice daily. Naturally I want to use FME (Flow hosted in this case) to automate the creation of these.

I know FME has some cool tools for generating output to word, html and pdf but there are some nuances in their use (layout and formatting) that I find difficult to fathom and means most attempts I have tried so far look like something from a kindergartener (obviously an advanced kindergartner with GIS skills but still….)

Anyway, I’d like to see a short course how to effectively use these ‘old school’ methods of communication. 

FME and Python for the Advanced Users.

+1 for Raster!

And, add another advanced-level Flow ‘administrating’ and ‘authoring’ on top of the current, with in-depth covering of e.g.

• Dynamic engine-assignment, ‘next level’
• Streams, ‘tips and tricks’

Maybe I have missed this, but I would really like to see an in depth course of FME Form/Flow CLI. 

Thanks for all the ideas, folks! There are some good ones in here. It's good to see that the loops module is a popular idea; we hope to work on that in the future.

@marcust, good ideas. have you checked out some of the content on the Knowledge Base? Might not get you all the way there, but it could be helpful. For example:

• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407606894477-How-to-Customize-HTML-Reports
• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/27746256419213-ArcGIS-Utility-Network-Data-Generating-HTML-Report
• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407455054861-Creating-PDF-Cartographic-Output
• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/sections/25523542058125-Reporting

@martinkoch, good ideas as well. We hope to expand the FME Flow content in the future. If you have not seen them, you should check out:

• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407385979405-Getting-Started-with-FME-Flow-Administration
• https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME-Flow/PDF-FMEFlowAdminGuide.pdf
• https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407472101005-FME-and-Stream-Processing

@_jacques_, what would you want to see covered in such a course? If you haven’t already seen it, you can check out the docs on this topic:

• https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_CommandLine/
• https://github.com/safesoftware/fmeflow-cli/blob/main/docs/fmeflow.md

Thanks @samatsafe , I’ll check those out.

I’m currently looking into automating deployment of FME workspaces using Azure Devops and pipelines, so using the CLI to test and deploy workspaces would be interesting.

Thanks @samatsafe, I will check those out.