Question

Issues with the FeatureMerger FME2013 SP2

  • 17 July 2013
  • 8 replies
  • 4 views
jelle
Rank
Badge +11
Dear All, 

 

 

I've encountered an oddity with the new Feature Merger in FME 2013 SP2. I could solve it by using the old one (copy it from an older workbench), however. 

 

 

I'm am very sure that I don't have duplicate suppliers, since the supplier join attribute is a primary key in the Oracle database (select alias,count(alias) from st_cd_b group by alias having count(alias) > 1;  --> returns no records).

 

 

However, with the new Feature merger, suppliers that do not find a match for the requester, sort at the Duplicate Supplier Port. This is not the case with the classic feature merger, at which there are indeed no duplicate suppliers.

 

 

Where did I go wrong?

 

You can find screenshots on https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/109201481503224986514/albums/5901547519637016577

 

 

 

best regards, 

 

Jelle

8 replies

david_r
Rank
Userlevel 4
Hi,

 

 

are you positive there are no duplicate suppliers? There seems to be a lot more features entering the supplier port than the requestor...

 

 

Try outputting both the Requestors and Suppliers to a couple of database tables and join them together to verify.

 

 

David
jelle
Rank
Badge +11
Hi David, 

 

 

Thank you for your answer. 

 

 

I'm quite sure indeed. The reason why there are much more features entering than leaving is because I clipped the requestor features to get rid of the buffer around it. The supplier features don't contain geometry. Merging them with the ALIAS_ID of (clipped) requestors, should retain only the Supplier records. In this way, I can get rid of the ALIAS objects in the buffer as well.

 

 

The question remains: why would the new transformer behave differently?

 

 

 

best regards,

 

Jelle
david_r
Rank
Userlevel 4
Hi Jelle,

 

 

I would be surprised if the FeatureMerger behaves differently in the core functionality. It might differ slightly in how it treats duplicate suppliers, though, which I think might be the issue here.

 

 

I tried to reproduce the issue here but was not able to find anything unusual.

 

 

Again, I would start by looking at the actual data. Try inserting a DuplicateRemover on the Suppliers and see what happens.

 

 

David.
takashi
Rank
Userlevel 2
Badge +17
Hi Jelle,   The description about DUPLICATE_SUPPLIER port of the FeatureMerger says "Note that duplicate Suppliers will only be output if Process Duplicate Suppliers is set to No".

 

I guess there is difference of this parameter setting between two FeatrueMergers (older and newer). Take a look at this point. You can also check by the DuplicateRemover transformer whether the duplicate suppliers exist actually in the workflow.   By the way, there are some strange behaviors in the parameter settings dialog box of the new FeatureMerger. Those are issues about enabling-disabling of the "Geometry Merge Type" and "Supplier List Name". I already requested to the Safe to confirm those a few weeks ago.

 

 

Takashi
jelle
Rank
Badge +11
Hi David and Takashi, 

 

 

I think I've found what happens, by using the Remove Duplicates function indeed. The thing is that there are quite a lot of ALIAS fields on NULL. The classic feature merger ignores these. The new one considers these as duplicates. If the NULL Values have been deleted, the new Transformer hase the same behaviour as the classic one. I added a screenshot with the result. This should make it clear, I think. 

 

 

 

I am aware of the fact that there will be no dupplicate suppliers if you process them with the option on 'No'. This was is the case for both the transformers (as you can see in the screenshots). 

 

It is indeed strange that the Geometry Option becomes available when you process the duplicate suppliers. I was wondering why, but it is probably an interface issue.

 

 

 

best regards, 

 

Jelle
jelle
Rank
Badge +11
I mean, duplicate option on 'yes', obviously.
takashi
Rank
Userlevel 2
Badge +17
Hi Jelle,

 

 

Glad to know you solved the problem. I didn't think of that reason.   > It is indeed strange that the Geometry Option becomes available when you process the duplicate suppliers.   This strange behavior of the interface is same as the issue I reported to the Safe. They know it, so I think it will be fixed shortly.

 

 

Takashi
fmelizard
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge +13
Hi Guys

 

I see the issue Jelle has pointed out.  One could argue that the way it works now - where all nulls for the join field are considered duplicates - is correct, but this is definitely a backwards compatiablity issue which we always try to avoid.  I've reported this change and we'll see what happens.

 

Thanks for this discussion everyone - it really helped to see the issue.

 

 

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