Solved

Bcf Writer Examples?

F
Badge +1

Hi Everyone

 

I see that there is a .bcf writer available in fme:

https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Desktop_Documentation/FME_ReadersWriters/bcf/bcf.htm

 

The documentation mentions that .png "snapshots" should be created for the writer. To my knowledge I have not seen any way to take images from fmes workbench viewer or inspector, therefore I assume you will have to create your own pngs for this.. Has anyone had a go at trying to write .bcfs in FME? I would love to see some best practices or how tos for this writer.

 

Regards

Fred

 

Regards

Fred

icon

Best answer by freddy17 24 August 2022, 10:26

View original

2 replies

kailinatsafe
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +13

Hello @freddy17​ , thanks for posting! Unfortunately, we have no examples online for BCF writing. This format is fairly new to me, so if something doesn't make sense please let me know! I will do my best to re-explain properly.

 

Do you have any raster features in your dataset? It looks like the writer will write PNG snapshots from features with raster geometry. To be written, these features will need to have a  xml_topic_guid attribute manually added to each feature.

 

It seems like the guid is used to create a directory in the dataset zip file, where all of the features with the same guid will be written to that folder (more or less grouping the snapshot with other features in the dataset). If there are multiple snapshots in the same topic, you will also need to manually assign  xml_viewpoint_id as well. This information can be found here.

 

It doesn't look like there are many value constraints by the writer for these attributes. However, it does get used to create a file directory, so that would provide some basic constraints: no slashes, limited special characters, etc. Hope this helps, Kailin

F
Badge +1

Hi Kailin

 

Thank you for your input. I looked at the documentation, but found that the writer wanted a whole list of attributes that I wasnt sure how to package properly, because the bcf zip is a combination of file types.

 

So I found a work around.

Because I am creating my own pngs, I created my own camera vectors in fme and wrote them into separate xml_topic_guid xml files.

Each topic is then created in a folder with all needed files and all the topcis is zipped together. By renaming the zip file to a bcfzip, I managed to fake write a bcfzip file!

.bcfwriter 

Reply


Community Stats

28,709
Posts
109,481
Replies
36,554
Members
Terms & ConditionsCookie settings
A product of
Safe Software respectfully acknowledges that we live, learn and work on the traditional and unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo First Nations.