Hello FME'ers,
A slightly late What's Up Wednesday because of the webinar I was in yesterday. But it's still packed full of fun and useful content...
FME Community Webinar
Our FME Community webinar was yesterday. If you're interested, you can find the recording on our website or on YouTube. We also have a blog about it too.
We showed how to use FME to crowdsource data for an ArcGIS Online map (even if it did get a bit slow at times), and we played a City Guesser game that was pretty cool.
Dale and I managed to describe and demonstrate the FeatureTypeFilter transformer (picked at random by a marble race) and the FME Scavenger Hunt was launched. Oh, and everyone got a free lunch on us.
And afterwards... well, these are the bits that got cut out of the official recording! Enjoy.
FME Scavenger Hunt
The FME scavenger hunt is up and running.
So far we have 37 players, making up 9 teams, including our first company team, "Team Abley" from New Zealand. There are currently 5 missions to complete (remember the Preview missions get replaced on Monday):
...and the current leaderboard looks like this:
Team XML is languishing in last place, so XML fans need to get their act together! Also, I created a megathread to discuss the event in these forums, and remember, if you want to use one of the private teams, let me know.
Phone Number Validation
We talked about hub transformers last week, but one that I missed was the PhoneNumberValidator by 1Spatial. Dave Eagle told me:
"It’s a companion to our earlier custom transformer the UKPostcodeValidator that has been pretty popular. This was a fun exercise, especially as it meant we discovered a telephone number range that can legitimately be used in television and radio dramas"If you click the link above you'll see all of 1Spatial's FME tools, including the postcode and telephone number validator. And if you want a fake phone number for use in TV or film, then this is the page you need!
Oh, and speaking of David Eagle and 1Spatial, he's hosting a webinar next week, "How to Get the Most from Cache Mode". So click the link to learn more.
More FME Hub
Also on the FME Hub, Nick Janse has created a new transformer called the SchemaValidator. I haven't checked it out yet, but I will do because it looks like a great example of automatically handling Schema Drift.
Meanwhile, Bruce Harold has made an update to his Transistor transformer, and has also published a new transformer called the EsriOptimizedModalTripRouter!
Python Training
In a recent discussion at Safe, we considered if Tcl support should be retired completely. It won't be, but the fact is that Python is very much the dominant coding language for FME.
All of which is leading up to mentioning an online training course - "An Introduction to Python as an Extension of FME" - that is being held by our platinum partner in Germany, con terra.
Although it's not free, I'm sure it will be very worthwhile. As I mentioned, it's online, it's in English, and - heck - I'd sign up and take part if I could!
Click the above link for further details and course content.
FME and Cartography
If you're a dedicated cartographer, you'll probably use Adobe Illustrator to finish your map design. I've done that and FME has a handy Illustrator writer to get data in there.
But, if you want a little more, Avenza Systems has an FME add-on that helps to translate data to Illustrator via their MAPublisher tools, with a little more control:
Although I knew about this tool, I was reminded of it recently and I think I'll sign up for their free trial when I get a moment and maybe record some videos of setting it up. Let me know if you think that would be useful to anyone.
Congratulations
Congratulations this week to:
- Théo Drogo: for obtaining his FME Certified Trainer certification.
- The user @Anjana M who became our 20,000th member of this community (we'll be in touch with a special gift for you)
- The Town of Mono, Ontario, the City of Longueuil, Quebec, and Public Service and Procurement Canada. All three of these organizations were winners of Consortech's 2022 Awards of FME Excellence.
You can find more information on those award-winning projects in this video/webinar presentation.