Can I read data from Socrata in FME?

Yes! There are a few different ways to access data on a Socrata Open Data Portal with FME depending on how you want to access your data.

If you want to get access to all the data in a dataset at once, open the dataset in a web browser, and locate the Export option. Then under Download As, locate the format you want to download the data as (FME supports CSV, JSON, RSS, and XML), right-click and choose copy link address. Then add the appropriate writer into your workspace and set the source path to the link you copied.

Note: if the dataset you want to read from is Private, you can check the option to Use Network Authentication in the Parameters for any of those readers and enter your username/password to access the dataset.

If you want access to just a subset of the dataset (by applying a query or filter when reading), you can make use of the SODA API for the dataset to query the data through HTTPS. To find the end-point for that, open the Socrata dataset in a web browser and look for Export > SODA API. You can then interact with the API in FME using the HTTPCaller transformer.

There are also Python and R packages for interacting with the SODA API, so you could use the PythonCaller or RCaller to make queries too.