Question

What causes a workspace fmw to be saved in JSON format?

  • 19 September 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 13 views
chk1
Rank
Badge +6

While looking through a folder of workspaces with a text editor, I noticed that one workspace fmw file was not in the usual XML-like format. It was instead a JSON file with a leading header line:

# application/x-fme-json-workspace

The last build/saved metadata states "FME(R) 2020.0.2.1 (20200511 - Build 20238 - WIN64)" - however when I create a new workspace with this version, it is saved in the XML format. I tried a variety of FME Desktop versions from 2019 to the most recent 2022, none save to JSON, but all are able to open the JSON fmw.

 

This question is in part simply out of curiosity, and also because I have made a small Python script that iterates over a folder to gather some metadata that the WorkspaceReader does not publish (luckily the attributes I'm looking for are in the same "path" in both formats).

3 replies

david_r
Rank
Userlevel 4

That's an interesting observation, I've never seen this myself. I just searched through some 1400 workspace files (going back 10+ years) and was not able to find any such JSON variants.

I suspect you'll have to contact Safe support for this one.

chk1
Rank
Badge +6

Today I found another format which roughly looks as follows:

FMW0001
#
# bunch of metadata here
#
 
**********
<binary data here until end of file>

File is not encrypted, I can't tell if it's just compressed in some way. 

 

 

JennaKAtSafe
Rank
Badge +6

Hi @chk1​, thank you for brining up this interesting observation. Here are some thoughts on the origin of this json workspace.

Webbench in FME Server converts xml workspaces to json for the gui. This is the only place where we suspect the json workspace originated from. This however should have only been a temporary file on FME Server, and your instance "escaped". Hope this can answer a part of this mystery.

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