Generic Writer questions

Hi,

 

 

in my opinion, it's easier to get fine-grained control over your outputs if you use regular, dedicated writers and just use a test-filter to branch your output to the relevant writer depending on your published parameter.

 

 

I say this because it is my experience that users of a dwg will often have particular demands that aren't relevant for shape files (colors, fonts, etc), and vice versa. YMMV, though.

 

 

David

Hi,

 

 

In the case of format specific attributes you can either create them, or add writers of your format choice and configure them.

 

The presence of the format specific writers should be sufficient (no feature types needed).

 

Hope this helps

The 'Choice with alias' parameter should be what you need if you want to use the Generic Writer. There's a great Evangelist article here that explains how to use it... http://evangelism.safe.com/fmeevangelist38/

Okay I almost have it. That article is very helpful. I have the drop down five formats avialabe in my published workbench. But they only write to shape regardless of which format is picked. So I stii haven't done this part: The Custom Parameter still needs to be married to the actual writer parameter.  

 

 

This bit confuses me:

 

The Custom Parameter still needs to be married to the actual writer parameter.

 

 

So I only have one writer, shape. So how does it know how to use the other writers? I guess I need those too. ? 

I would tend to agree with David R. If you need to symbolize your CAD files then using the native writer is a good approach. If you combine this with a Dynamic Workflow and SchemaMapper then the workspace itself won't be too complex. You can also use template files for your Geodatabase and DWG file creation.

 

The S57 data your making available has many feature types so you may want to consider using scripted parameters to "group" the source features so the user doesn't have to select every available feature class, i.e. Buoys could be used to selct all buoy feature classes