If anyone has any ideas or insight on where I could go from here they would all be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Question
Appending new records to Shapefile using FME
I’m just curious if someone could help me or give me a little direction. I was given the task to geocode a list of addresses from an excel table and populate them on a map. That part is all good but one of the tasks in the project is to append new addresses that come in and have them update on the map. I know about creating a dynamic feature class in geocoding and just editing the addresses manually but I was given instruction to use FME to create a workflow that takes the excel files and automatically adds them to a map. I have very basic knowledge of FME and how it works.
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+22- Safer
Hi,
Since your FME knowledge is basic, I would suggest reading about FME and transformations in the available resources (FMEpedia, Youtube, etc)
If you are using a spatial database for the map component I would suggest searching for information on how to interact with a db via FME.
One element to consider are clear arrendgements with the providers of the data about data type and schema, that can assist in creating an automated transformation.
Hope this helps.
+9- Contributor
Its not possible to append to shapefiles (same reader/writer file), but you can mimmick and INSERT/UPDATE by using the feature holder as a blocking transformer before the writer so that all features are run through the workbench prior to writing them all out at once. Without it, depending on the transformers used you may end up only writing out the first feature
+59- Safer
Hi
Welcome to the world of FME.
I guess this partly depends on what you mean by map; do you want FME to create a map (maybe an online map) or just write the information to a Shape dataset from which the map is created?
Assuming the latter, there are two tasks: geocoding the input and creating the output.
There are specific geocoding transformers in FME that you can use to geocode data. Alternatively you can use a HTTP transformer to pass a call to any other online geocoding service you like. This page has a good example, while this page has an actual working example that you might be able to make use of.
Writing the data to Shape is fairly straightforward. The difficulty - as others have mentioned - is when you need to append data to Shape. Perhaps you could write them separately and the end application can just append that file to the map? If not, then you need to both read and write the same dataset. Basically read the Shape and the Excel, then merge the data together and write it to a new output.
If you can just create a new (differently named) output, then that is as much as you need do, and I think that would work for you. If - for some reason - you actually did want to overwrite the original dataset, then you would simply need to add a FeatureHolder transformer before the writer.
I hope this helps to answer your question,
Mark
Mark Ireland
Product Evangelist
Safe Software Inc.
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