Huge thanks to
It really gave me the push to finally share some of the custom tools I’ve built, starting with this one: the TimeSeriesGenerator.
The idea came up when I needed to build a time‑series dataset to plot user activity over time. My end goal was to generate an HTML report showing how users interacted with an application.
I was starting from a log file of user requests, but if no one made a request during a given period, I’d have gaps in my data and nothing to show in the report.
This issue is a common one. Even FME Flow with his analytics page doesn’t handle time period with no data.
That’s where the TimeSeriesGenerator comes in !
It creates a continuous series of timestamps between a start date and an end date, at a specified interval in seconds. You can then join your actual log data to those timestamps and be sure you’ll see a value (even if it’s zero) for every interval.
Here’s how it works in FME Workbench:
– Feed in your start date, end date, and interval
– The transformer outputs a list called “timestamps{}”
– Each item in that list has three attributes:
• timestamps{}.timestampFME (FME’s native date format)
• timestamps{}.timestampISO (ISO 8601 format)
• timestamps{}.timestampEPOCH (Unix epoch time in seconds)
For example, you can hook up a Creator transformer → TimeSeriesGenerator → ListExploder and end up with a table of evenly spaced timestamps ready to join with your real data.
It’s also great for making sample datasets. For instance, use Creator + TimeSeriesGenerator + ListExploder to get your timestamps, then toss in a couple of RandomNumberGenerator transformers to add fake “temperature” and “humidity” readings. Now you’ve got realistic-looking sensor data over time.
It gets really handy when paired with the HTMLReportGenerator to plot time‑series charts in your reports.
I hope you find the TimeSeriesGenerator useful! Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.
You can find it here : https://hub.safe.com/publishers/abizien/transformers/timeseriesgenerator
Check out my FME Hub publisher page to find out about my other tools