Hi FME'ers,
Apologies for the lack of What's Up Wednesday last week. Both Liz and I were out of the office. Anyway, let's dive into FME news for this week.
Upcoming Webinars
It's been a while since I listed upcoming webinars, so here are a few.
The most important to me is Build Your FME Community Network, where on October 19th Dale and I will cover some of the changes we're making to this community, and have a go at a couple of community activities. So make sure to join us because it should be both educational and entertaining.
Also upcoming is the Masked Revit User on October 27th.
This is where a special guest Revit user will demonstrate real-world examples of what others have made possible by using FME to automate preparing and extracting from Revit.
The other webinar I wanted to highlight takes place on 20th October and is about Automation Keys in FME Server. Automations are really powerful items and one of the reasons is the ability to pass information from one component to the next. But to do that you need to know about Automation Keys, and that's where this webinar will help you.
Community Survey 2021
Thank you to everyone who participated in the FME Community Survey for 2021. This will be really important in helping us to build and grow the FME community into a useful resource.
To give you a couple of statistics that we learned, the average rating for Q+A answers was 4.0 for quality but 3.81 for timeliness. So we'll try to look at ways to improve those numbers over the coming year and how we can get you better answers quicker.
Also, 43% of you have shared your FME skills with a non-profit organization (you rock!) and 70% of you think you would recognize other community members at a world tour or user conference event. That's very encouraging because we want our users to connect with each other online - just as you might at a conference - and we're going to try and help make that happen.
Rewarding Helpers
On the subject of Q+A answers, how does one reward another user who has helped them with FME? Well, you can upvote their post and select it as the best answer. But for extra-useful contributions, you can now also award a special Community Badge.
As shown above, just go to the user's profile, click the Give button under Recognition Badges, and you should be able to give them a Community Award. This includes the ability to include a message about how they helped you.
New FME 2021 Release
I notice that FME 2021.1.3 (build 21631) was recently released on our website. As usual at this time of year, most changes are basic bug fixes. I don't see anything major, but that are fixes for:
- Geocoder transformer
- Shapefile Reader (reading spatial index files)
- WorkspaceRunner transformer (fixed some parameter types)
- GeoPackage writer (when used dynamically)
- FMEServerJobSubmitter (fixed a problem with parameters in the GUI)
You may want to update FME for these fixes, but if you hadn't noticed these issues then it's unlikely that they affected you anyway.
FME Hub
There's not a lot in the hub digest for September. Only 3 items - and one of those was labelled as "test"! But speaking of which, I was asked questions about how hub test workspaces are used and how to download them.
So, when you submit an item to the hub, you can submit a workspace to the hub testsuite.
The Testsuite is simply an FME engine that runs the item. If there is a failure, then the author is notified. The engine is updated to be as new as possible (currently it's running FME 2021.1.3.0, build 21631) to ensure you can submit items from the current FME version.
You can't download the test workspace unless you are the author - or a member of the author's organization. Why? So that the author can include private information (like database connections) and not have to worry that anyone else can access it.
I did notice that there are some interesting items recently added to the hub (including ones for the Swedish mapping agency API) so hopefully, the October digest will be more interesting.
Other Stuff
- From LinkedIn, check out the IMGS FME Intelligence event recordings.
- On Twitter, check out Dmitri's demo of improved geolocation in FMEAR.
- This community idea for the NoFeaturesTester. Should it become an official FME transformer?
- On YouTube (and Twitch) a live demo of creating a queue in FME Server and assigning an engine to it.
- Also on Twitter, this very unscientific poll on what you think of geotagged tweets. What's your opinion?
