Hi all,

Today I wanted to set an attribute based on incoming values of an fme_feature_type name. I noticed that if I wanted to avoid getting an 'Incomplete Transformers' warning from FME, I would have to expose the fme_feature_type attribute first, before I could use it in e.g. an Attribute Value expression of e.g. an AttributeManager or AttributeCreator.

Note that it was possible to disregard the warning, and the expression would still work.

I wanted to avoid the incomplete (red cogwheel) warning. But as I also wanted to keep things clean in the workspace, I wanted to perform both actions in an AttributeManager; first expose fme_feature_type in the first line, and then in the second line set a new attribute using the exposed fme_feature_type attribute.

However, I noticed that the AttributeManager still shows up as incomplete (red cogwheel), and if I look at the summary annotation of the AttributeManager it only shows the line about creating the new attribute, but not the first expose line. See also the below screenshot;

This seems like a bit of a bug to me, as normally it is possible to use the actions of preceding lines in an AttributeManager, in succeeding lines (and for sure it's a bit weird that the first line/rule doesn't show up in the summary annotation).

I get that there are easy ways to deal with this (of which most notably first using an AttributeExposer before using the AttributeManager), but for me it's mainly to share this finding on the AttributeManager (as I think this behaviour shouldn't happen).

On a sidenote, I think this situation might have been the result of an earlier fix for the AttributeManager (I guess Version 3), in which the 'Do Nothing' action would be changed to 'Expose', whenever attributes would be removed somewhere upstream in the translation. Because of this, whenever you wanted to remove attributes from (the AttributeManager in) your workspace, in the previous version, you would have to go about to remove the attributes out of each AttributeManager in the workspace (starting from the highest upstream to the lowest downstream).

That said I'm really glad that that behaviour doesn't occur anymore in the/my current FME version!

Curious to hear other people's thoughts and ideas about this.

Kind regards,

Thijs

ps. I'm currently using FME 2021.2.2.0 (b21806 - win64)