It's not clear to me whether you are using XRay to generate the metadata and then want FME to manipulate that, or that you would like to do everything in FME, but there is currently no out of the box reporting/metadata transformer that does exactly what you want (you could post an idea).
Like the "FME and Metadata" article already mentioned, it is up to you to parse the XML data. There are a lot of transformers (XMLTemplater, XMLUpdater, XMLFlattener etc.) that can help you with that.
Two days ago, the FME Evangelist tweeted that there are some new "HTML-generating transformers" coming up in the 2016.1 release, so that might also be interesting for you.
Hakuna Matata, I like metatata. This is going to be my Lync status from now on.
@sander_s Thank you for your answer. Actually, it doesn't matter whether I use X-Ray for the first process or just do everything in FME--as long as what I want to get done get's done. How familiar are you with the X-Ray tool available in ArcCatalog? Let me make it very clear what it can do and does, if you are not: It will scan(?) an entire domain (and I mean a database domain in this context) in SDE and then create the XML required to describe the following: the data dictionary for the elements of that domain, the relationship between the features and elements *and* the domains (in this case, I am referring to the "attribute domains" that exist for any elements where there are such things), the constraints that exist on the elements, and......here is the fun part. It takes that XML that it creates and then converts that to a single html page that has a table of the various data dictionary elelments, a table of contents with bookmark links to all of the elements, and linked references to the attribute domains within the data dictionary tables that are created. Seriously, it does all that. Are you familiar? Now, if FME can do that and more, great! But this is the next step that I need: I need to be able to insert some html5 code for linking tooltips to the first element in all of the data dictionary tables; that is, the first <td> element of each row <tr> of the tables, mostly. I am guessing that there is an XML Templater/XML Updater sort of function in the X-Ray tool for ArcCatalog, but it is pretty clear that it is working in the background and there is no way to get at it.
Bottom line: I will be looking at those new "HTML-generating transformers" that you mentioned and I am grateful for the tip. Thanks.
@sander_s Thank you for your answer. Actually, it doesn't matter whether I use X-Ray for the first process or just do everything in FME--as long as what I want to get done get's done. How familiar are you with the X-Ray tool available in ArcCatalog? Let me make it very clear what it can do and does, if you are not: It will scan(?) an entire domain (and I mean a database domain in this context) in SDE and then create the XML required to describe the following: the data dictionary for the elements of that domain, the relationship between the features and elements *and* the domains (in this case, I am referring to the "attribute domains" that exist for any elements where there are such things), the constraints that exist on the elements, and......here is the fun part. It takes that XML that it creates and then converts that to a single html page that has a table of the various data dictionary elelments, a table of contents with bookmark links to all of the elements, and linked references to the attribute domains within the data dictionary tables that are created. Seriously, it does all that. Are you familiar? Now, if FME can do that and more, great! But this is the next step that I need: I need to be able to insert some html5 code for linking tooltips to the first element in all of the data dictionary tables; that is, the first <td> element of each row <tr> of the tables, mostly. I am guessing that there is an XML Templater/XML Updater sort of function in the X-Ray tool for ArcCatalog, but it is pretty clear that it is working in the background and there is no way to get at it.
Bottom line: I will be looking at those new "HTML-generating transformers" that you mentioned and I am grateful for the tip. Thanks.
Thanks for your explanation. I wasn't familiar with X-Ray, but of course I did a little research before I replied. Although it's probably going to be quite a lot of work, I don't see why FME couldn't do this as well. You are going to need an ArcSDE/Geodatabase (schema) reader, some SQLExecutors maybe, StatisticsCalculators, FeatureMergers, XML transformers and probably one or more PythonCallers (for use with ArcPy, so you can get the info you can only retrieve through ArcObjects), but it's definitely doable, I think. If you take the time to build it, the main advantage would be that you can harvest this metadata your way, leaving out the things you don't need and adding stuff X-Ray doesn't do, storing it in any kind of format you like.
