Question of the Week: Which transformer do you think you’re strongest with?

I’m gonna pick the Junction!

It doesn’t change your features or attributes, in fact it doesn’t do anything to your data!

But what it does do, is provides you with a tool to organise and set out your workspaces to make them easy to view, document and maintain.

FME's Swiss army knife for attributes: the AttributeManager.

The AttributeManager contains many many functions to create, rename, delete and reorder your attributes. It allows you to set the value of attributes, using other attributes of the same feature, but also based on the values of attributes of features that come before or after the current feature.

Also the AttributeManager can be used to set the data type of attributes.

Recently the FeatureReader saved my life into a big project so I will say this one ! Thank you to be so flexible !

I’ve come along recently to understand and user Counter transformer properly, with the advanced local vs global scope. 

But be careful when renaming these Counter transformers and expect there unexpected if you don’t use Feature Caching correctly

Using multiple counters transformers in a workspace can produce different results. Keep the Counter transformers all the same. https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME-Form-Documentation/FME-Transformers/Transformers/counter.htm 

the Tester - to filter out unneeded data or to split data into separate processes 

I’m with ​@geomancer on this one. My workbenches are chock full of AttributeManager transformers to wrangle data into something sensible. To take their analogy further:  I’ve always considered FME to be the Swiss army knife of data management software, so the AttributeManager is like having a knife that pops a whole new knife out of it.

DateTimeConverter:  I am not sure when it was added but being able to use conditional statements now is awesome. We have fought this battle many times. 
if we have data with single and 2 digit months and days they will fail. So being able to conditionally set the input format to get all values into one is really helping. 

Every single workspace I build ends up having numerous attribute managers and many testers to scrub, clean and standardize data.  Helping my colleagues and partner municipalities with data integration into GIS continually shows me how inconsistent and “dirty” the incomming data is, even when it comes from other software programs that just do not enforce data standards. 

 

I use the Attribute Manager all the time.  The Change Detection, Feature Merger, and Duplicate Point Spreader have also become common in my workflows.  

GeometryValidator - This is game changing transformer for validating geometry. It detects & fixes most of the geometrical issues. It’s so versatile and ensures high quality geospatial data.

3DTILES writer: I use it every day, but its functionality is still lacking. It hasn't been updated for many years, and there's no hope for it in 2026

For me, it would probably be the HTTPCaller. I use it everywhere!

As with multiple others, AttributeManager - followed by Tester -- gets my vote for most often used transformer.