I want to make the internal lines of road segments invisible but keep the attributes. The dissolve tool does the job aesthetically (seperates 6000 road segment polygons into 45 'Dissolve_Area' polygons and 5955 'Dissolver_InteriorLine' lines) but doesn't keep the attributes. I have only been using FME since the beginning of the week so please be gentle.
Hi @kylewade, parameter setting in the Dissolver - "Accumulation Mode" (FME 2016.1+) or "Keep Input Attributes" (FME 2016.0 and earlier) might help you.
Welcome to the world of FME! We're always glad to help a new user here (so is our support team at safe.com/support or your local reseller).
Anyway, is it enough to simply hide the lines by coloring them the same color as the fill? If so the FeatureColorSetter transformer might be what you need, or the KMLStyler (DGNStyler, DWGStyler, etc) if you are using one of those particular formats.
Then features look like one block, but you can query each one with its attributes.
If you really want to dissolve or merge the features together, then yes you could check the Generate List box and create a list of all the attributes that belonged to the original features. The first problem there is one of size (6000/45=133) so you would have 133 sets of attributes per feature, which is not going to be easy to view. The second problem is I don't know of many formats of data you could write that to with that structure. You would need to do something with that list of attributes, like create a join table, or concatenate them together, or something like that.
I hope that helps, and do let the community know if you need more assistance.
Mark
Product Evangelist
Safe Software Inc.