Archive for category FME
Live from FMEUC, it’s the Tim and Jason show!
Posted by Jason Birch in FME on August 11, 2009
OK, so better late than never. At the always-awesome FME User Conference, Tim Taylor and I did a short presentation on Nanaimo’s use of FME Server.
I think we did OK, but I definitely need to spend a bit more time polishing both my presentation and the slides next time.
Check out other great FME UC Videos on Safe’s user conference website. There is a lot of valuable videos, with case studies and technical presentations which will show you how your business processes could be improved by using FME.
As an aside, I count myself fortunate to live within driving distance to two of the best geospatial conferences in the world. In these times of tight budgets, I am incredibly grateful to be able to attend both the FME User Conference and GeoWeb.
-J
FME 2009 – It’s the little things
Posted by Jason Birch in FME on January 15, 2009
(warning, this post may contain Windows user interface screen shots some may find offensive)
Safe Software’s FME Workbench has the best user interface that I have ever used. Hands down. Every time I have to use something with similar functionality such as Microsoft’s SSIS, or even the time I wasted a whole weekend trying to get an open source ETL tool to do what I wanted it to do, I find myself wishing I could be working in FME instead. It was great when I started using it six years ago, and it’s been getting better with every release.
Although Safe has definitely been busy with FME 2009 (get the whole story on fmepedia’s What’s Fine in 2009 page), it almost seems tame compared to some of the major changes in the last couple releases. However, behind the scenes there was a major UI refresh. Three of the new UI features are among the things I think are coolest about this latest release.
First, they created a really intuitive “default settings” interface. As far as I can remember, previous releases didn’t even have default settings for transformers, and dataset defaults were set through a dialog box hidden in the configuration UI. It was so much trouble to use that I don’t imagine many people were setting default values unless they had something that REALLY annoyed them:
For 2009, rather than hiding these values deep in a configuration dialog somewhere, they let users set the default as they are working with the data stores and with individual transformers. This is something I’d love to see more applications do. Here’s an example:
And another of setting transformer defaults:
Couldn’t be easier. I predict that many users–even ones that didn’t know this functionality was available in previous releases–will be using this. My only suggestion would be the addition of a “Save As …” option, so we could have two or three sets of default values for each item. For instance, I want to have the values for both my testing and production database configurations available. And I want to have my favourite “Smoothing” and “Thinning” profiles for the Generalizer.
The second feature that I really like about the new UI is Quick Connect. Mark describes this over at the FME Evangelist blog better than I ever could… make sure to watch his cheesy movie for some time-saving tips.
I’ve known that I’ve had one of the problems that this feature solves ever since I’ve been using FME. Basically, it was very hard to connect two transformers that were so far apart that they neither fit on the screen nor were clickable when zoomed-out. I made a feature request for this, but my potential solution was really clunky. With this new feature, connecting two trans-workspace transformers is quick, easy, and intuitive.
The final feature that I really like is the ability to edit source feature attributes. Now normally, source feature attributes don’t change, and even if they do FME provides an effective wizard that allows you to refresh the source feature definitions from their original source without manual intervention. Where this really comes in handy is when you use the optional SELECT Statement parameter to join to a secondary table:
Now, instead of jumping through lots of hoops to have the joined attributes show up in your workspace, you can enable the option that allows you to redefine the source feature’s attributes:
There are many other nice UI changes in this release, and some of the non-UI changes are really great too. Things that I may actually use include new XML features (XQuery and XSLT transformers) and new raster features such as RasterExpressionEvaluator (not quite DOCELL yet, but getting there), support for BigTIFF, and the ability to visualize rasters in the FME Viewer.
I’m sure that there’s something for everyone in the feature list; make sure to check out FME 2009 when you get a chance.
-J
p.s. I had to change my theme as part of my WP 2.7 upgrade, and while I was at it I hacked WordPress so that XMLRPC would work properly with SSL and tried out Windows Live Writer (with a twitter notify plugin). Seems to have worked OK so far…
SQLite Spatial Files in FME 2009 through the Magic of FDO
Posted by Jason Birch in FDO, FME, Formats, Open Source, Tutorial on December 2, 2008
Writing the FDO/GDAL style of SQLite spatial files (see previous post for details) just got a LOT easier for those of us using Safe Software’s FME Desktop, even the affordable Base edition.
Over the past month, developers at Safe Software and the author of the FDO SQLite provider have put some time into ensuring that the SQLite provider will work properly with FME 2009. Reading worked fine out of the box, but writing required a bit of effort. FME needed datastore creation and schema writing added to their generic FDO writer, and the FDO SQLite provider needed to account for the way that FME writes to multiple schemas.
Here’s how you can take advantage of this provider in FME (and in other FDO 3.3 consumers, such as MapGuide Open Source 2.0):
- Download the unofficial binaries for the SQLite provider from my site
- Open this zipfile and copy the SQLiteProvider.dll file into your FDO directory (default c:\Program Files\FME\plugins\fdo\)
- Make a backup of the providers.xml file in that directory, and then edit the original, adding the contents of the sqlite_provider_entry.xml file in an appropriate location.
Once this installed, writing to SQLite from within FME is dead easy…
1. Add new FDO Destination Dataset:
2. Go to Settings and specify OSGeo.SQLite.3.3 as the provider name:
3: Specify the filename you want to write to:
4. Optionally, set a spatial reference system, and click on OK:
That’s it; now you can start adding tables to your SQLite file as you would any other destination dataset in FME!
As far as I know, Safe will not be distributing the SQLite provider directly with FME 2009 (it’s still in beta) primarily because the provider is not officially being released for FDO 3.3, and partially because the provider is still under heavy development. Fear not, though. I am building this provider against the 3.3 branch as often as necessary, and will post binaries as I do.
The relative ease with which this format was supported by FME can be attributed to Safe’s foresight in exposing FDO directly, rather than just using it behind-the-scenes in their SDF3 writer. They also allow FME to act as an FDO provider, which enables users of products that use FDO for their data layer (such as AutoCAD Map 3D) to access the full range of formats that FME supports.
-J
KML Goodness from the FME User Conference
Posted by Jason Birch in FME, Google Earth on March 13, 2008
The FME User Conference is always great value. You get to see interesting presentations, learn about new technologies, and talk to bright people from all across the industry. This last point is probably the most important to me. Mixed in with other great conversations, I got to chat at length with Ed Katibah about SQL Server Spatial, and Don Cooke told me I dressed too well to be a neogeographer :)
It is also the best place to corner an FME developer. I managed to grab Tom Weir, Safe’s KML guru, and go over some of the changes in KML support with FME 2008. During a presentation on the first day of the conference I had included an “easter egg” where I spoke about how to enable active mouse-overs in KML using FME. To my chagrin, after a couple minutes with Tom I realized that my advice was not exactly best practice, and with FME2008 becomes downright ridiculous.
Here’s the before shot from my slide deck (zipped workspace):
And the after shot once I applied what Tom showed me (zipped workspace):
Obviously, the FME 2008 press release should read: “KML Support in FME: Now with 50% less fat!”
KML FME has been generating multi-geometry for information points for quite some time, so that cuts most of the data wrangling out to generate the info point and merge the features into multi-geometry. And FME 2008 will automatically generate StyleMap elements for you if you follow a couple sneaky tricks.
First, when you create each KMLStyler, set its name to the style ID you want it to receive:
And second, on your geometry set the kml_target_style_normal and kml_target_style_highlight attributes to the IDs that you created in the KMLStylers:
That gets my embarrassment out of the way, but doesn’t even begin to touch on the extent of KML 2.2 support in FME 2008. Another issue that I have written about is extended data or schema support, and I am happy to say that FME deals with this. Attributes are stored in your output KML as extended data by default, and it is easy to generate a BalloonStyle template. Here’s my first take on this support, which does a great job of separating data from presentation (zipped workspace):
And a quick look at the new basic editor which is included in FME and used for modifying BalloonStyle templates:
Which gives us this KML output (source).
There is a going to be a lot more to the KML 2.2 support in FME 2008, including generation of image pyramids for PhotoOverlays, but I’ll leave it to you to explore those on your own.
-J
A really Safe place to be…
Posted by Jason Birch in FME on March 3, 2008
I’ll be attending and co-presenting with my colleague Matthew Dunstan at the FME Worldwide Users Conference later this week.
I am really looking forward to this conference, and am confident that it will measure up to the outstanding event that Dale, Don, and their team put on in 2006. The technical quality and value for users of FME is truly outstanding, and sets this conference apart from many other industry events.
I’m getting into town on Wednesday night and staying at the conference hotel. Drop me a line if you’re going to be there and want to hang out.
-J
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