What's Up Wednesday (10th July, 2024): Training Badges. Diving into Coordinates. Community Survey. FME and Energy. A Challenging Quiz.

Hello FME friends,

It's an exciting time right now. Yes, in a couple of week's time I'm going on vacation. Look out, Europe, here I come!

But, sure, it's also exciting because FME2024.1 was just released, we've got some nice updates and content on the FME Community platform, and so many of you awesome people are doing awesome things with FME.

So, I suppose I'll put vacation plans aside and talk about FME things, starting with a nice integration between our training and community platforms.

Training Badges

Users often ask why we can't get training and certification badges to appear on their FME Community profile. The answer is that the FME Academy and the FME Community are separate platforms, with no direct integration.

But that's not a very good excuse, especially when we have FME available. So, Academy manager Sam and I sat down and worked out a method to connect the two platforms.

The outcome is that every time you complete a course on the FME Academy, you earn a badge on the FME Community, too.

I should be clear that not every course earns you an award, just the following:

• FME Accelerator
• FME Form Basic
• FME Form Advanced
• FME Flow Authoring
• Integrate Data with the FME Platform
• Integrate Spatial Data

You'll also get an award when you complete:

• FME Certified Professional
• FME Flow Certified Professional
• FME Certified Trainer
• FME Business Certified Professional

How did we do this? Well, there is a webhook in Skilljar (the Academy platform) that we connected to an FME Flow webhook trigger:

The workspace it connects to simply reads the event payload, extracts information from the JSON content, tests if the course qualifies for a badge, and maps the course ID to a badge number.

Further on, we use the Gainsight API to look up the user by their email address and then award them the badge.

Notice the use of a TextEncoder. Email addresses can contain special characters that would cause the call to fail, so you should ALWAYS encode them in URL format before sending them to an API or other HTTP call.

Note 1: Because I'm using email addresses as the lookup, you must use the same email address on the Academy and Community. Actually, because you log in with the same account, that should always be true, but I thought I'd mention it.

Note 2: The integration only recently went live, and we haven't (yet) awarded badges to anyone with existing certification or training. We'll get onto that very shortly.

FME Lizard Exclusion Zone!

Did you know that you can add a signature to your FME Community profile? I don't have it set for FME, but on the Gainsight Community, I have it set to "Ask me about all things spatial!"

So, you can use it to make a witty comment, to give out contact information, or to advertise your activities elsewhere:

Or you could use it to make accusations against the FME Lizard!

OK, that's actually a fair comment. The FME Lizard earns points by making a lot of automatic posts and isn't excluded from the leaderboard because they aren't technically a Safe employee. It's definitely not fair to our users.

So, I went in and tweaked the code and now:

The leaderboard is officially a lizard-free zone!

Coordinate Input: Why Parentheses?

I recently mentioned how you can now enter coordinates into the Creator transformer with parentheses placed around them:

Adding parentheses didn't make much sense to me. It would be easier to enter the coordinates without them, but, whatever.

Now, I suddenly release the reason. Look at this feature in the log file:

Yes! Log coordinates are in this format! So, if I want to, I can simply copy coordinates from the log window and paste them into a Creator.

How great is that? But wait! There's more...

The following feature contains multiple rows of coordinates. I can only select the entire line of the log - including timestamps - and I can't paste that into the Creator, can I?

But what I can do is right-click and choose the option to "Copy (message only)". Then I get only the coordinates part of the log and can paste them into the Creator without problem.

Amazing! It's almost like they designed it that way ??

Coordinate Input: Why GeoJSON?

Another aspect of the Creator I didn't really expand on was why we added a GeoJSON parameter. Sure, it's nice to have the ability to paste GeoJSON geometry into that field:

But there has to be more to it than that, right?

Yes! Remember, the Geometry type user parameter allows GeoJSON encoding as input/output:

So, instead of having to use a Creator/GeometryReplacer combination for Flow Apps, you can now simply use a Creator whose GeoJSON value points to that parameter:

It's only 1 transformer fewer, but it just makes the workflow much more logical. And with another new piece of 2024.1 functionality:

...you can even add annotation to explain what that parameter is used for!

Community News

Community Survey

You may already be aware, but we're currently conducting a community survey, which you can find and fill in online.

There are 15 questions, and - as the survey says - in return, you receive the Survey Badge and the chance to win one of three FME swag packs.

In the last few years, we've moved to a new platform and poured more resources into the community. It's especially important to us that long-time users fill in the survey so we can see how the results have changed since the last one, about four years ago.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Question of the Week

This week's Question of the Week:

"What's a recent FME win you had?"

Do you have a particular success that you want to highlight to the community? Now's your chance.

Personally, I had problems posting an alert to the community when a new FME blog post was published. My Flow automation wasn't getting reliable alerts from the blog website itself.

For that reason, I decided to change my approach so that - instead of relying on an alert - I scrape content from the website daily and test to see if a new post has been made:

It's not as elegant, but sometimes you have to just do what is needed, and hand sanitizer is always available when you feel really bad about what you just created!

Luckily, FME doesn't judge you; in fact, it can often help make hacky, emergency solutions. Here, the HTMLExtractor helped me extract the information I needed, and ChatGPT even helped me with the CSS Selector syntax. It was a win that I hadn't expected to come so easily.

Weekly Quiz

This week's quiz is a category quiz, where you type in the answers. Typing is important this week because I want you to name all of the countries of Europe!

There are 50 different countries or, as Wikipedia calls them, "sovereign states", so I gave you 50 minutes to complete the quiz. One per minute? That's easy, yes? Well, not so much.

For me:

• In the first 10 minutes, I got 40 correct.
• In the next 10 minutes, I got 6 more correct.
• I then spent another 10 minutes ruining my score by making bad guesses.
• In the final 20 minutes, I somehow managed to fetch 2 more countries out of my memory.

Final Score: 42 (48 correct, 6 incorrect guesses).

The names have to be in English (I'm sorry), but I just want the short name (so no "Republic of ...."). Don't worry about spelling mistakes. You can subtract them from your score.

It really helps if you follow sports like football and F1 motor racing!

Have fun, and let me know what score you get.

FME and Energy

I have some items this week with the common theme of FME and energy. There are some user stories and a webinar to look forward to.

The first user story is set in Canada and is about Québec’s leading natural gas distribution company, énergir, and their use of FME.

énergir is responsible for over 11,000km of pipeline throughout the province. These pipelines need continuous inspection to check for leaks. Working with Safe partner Consortech, they put together a system based on FME Flow that helps to organize their inspection visits, optimize use of equipment, and process inspection data.

The second user story also involves work by Consortech. This time, the project is about processing technician work orders for an electrical supply company, Saint John Energy, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

The project uses FME to automate data transfers from Cityworks and ArcGIS. The solution has enabled the team to manage work orders more efficiently and optimize asset management.

Click the links above to check out those user stories.

But what about bioenergy? Bioenergy plays a crucial role in the global energy landscape, offering sustainable solutions for the future of renewable energy.

In an upcoming webinar, Solutial (in Brazil) will talk about the FME tools they have for the integrated and sustainable management of resources in bioenergy production, from identifying potential sites for plantations to monitoring the supply chain and forecasting production.

And one final item: Data Integration per le Utilities will be part of the GeneGIS #FMEInnovActionItalia event, on October 3, 2024.

More Upcoming Events

• 1Spatial is running a webinar called "5 Hot Features of FME2024" on 18th July, in both Australian and UK time zones. Hey, now they can include 2024.1, too!

• The Agenda for IMGS's Data Intelligence event is now online. Don Murray, President of Safe Software, will be the keynote speaker. There are presentations such as FME & Cloud Data Services, Empowering Public Sector Innovation with FME, and Managing Data Governance & Quality.

• Interested in FME and AI? Tensing is hosting a 60-minute FME AI Skill Booster Workshop on 17th July at 11am (UK Time)!

Miscellaneous News

• Back in January, Locus (NZ) made their predictions for the year 2024. Are they coming true? Find out with their recent update blog post.

• Congratulations to Safe partner Vicrea (Netherlands) on their 25th anniversary.

• Did you know that FME 2024.1 gained an option to turn off AI Assist? You can read about it - and other information, such as what data is captured - in this FME Knowledge Base article.

• 1Spatial has online an on-demand webinar about tips and tricks for using FME with Microsoft Azure.

• The FME Hub testsuite is now running on FME 2024.1.0.0 (build 24612) - basically means you can upload work created with the latest FME.