What's Up Wednesday (20th March, 2024): Community Updates, The Fine Points of FME2024, and more...

Hi FME Friends,

Most of this post covers improvements to the FME Community platform and improvements to FME in 2024.

There's one performance improvement in 2024 that just blew me away when I tried it out. Point cloud and raster users will love it. It's amazing.

If any of the community updates make you 10% as amazed, I would be happy!

Community Updates

When we launched the new community platform, our goal was to ensure you could use it at full speed from the very start. But we at Safe also started off at full speed, and have already been hard at work making improvements.

Here are a few of the things we've done so far:

Community Alerts

From the very start, a key goal of the community was to bring news and knowledge directly into the platform, from around the internet. Along those lines, we now have in place alerts for status notifications from status.safe.com:

So, if any of Safe's systems have scheduled maintenance or - let's hope not - fail completely, an alert will appear as a pop-up window, directly on the community.

Some alerts are posted as forum messages, and we've reorganized these so that you can sign up for them individually:

Yes, blog posts now get alerts too, which was a top request during the community webinar. You'll also notice a new forum specifically for Community-related questions.

Community Events

We can't really claim the credit for this: it was just a recent update to the platform itself. But we think these changes to the Events page will be very useful.

Firstly, past events have been moved to a separate tab, so they don't get in the way. Secondly, you can now filter events by type; for example, you can click the Webinar label to see only upcoming webinars.

We only have webinars and "world tour" type events listed so far, but we'll add training and partner events in the near future.

Something else we did to events was to hide the "Add to Calendar" buttons. Most of the time, these served no use as they just clashed with the same buttons on registration websites.

Bonus Reputation and Rewards

As far as possible, we like to reward users for participating in the community. So we now have a page where you can earn bonus points for answering old/stale questions.

Questions older than 3 days, with no response by a community member, are eligible for the bonus reward. Simply post a helpful answer and your reward is fully automated (thanks, FME).

One question from the recent community webinar was why we issue reward codes for webinars. Can't we integrate those systems automatically?

Yes, we could, but we want to expand the use of reward codes to - for example - partner webinars and events. It would be difficult (even with FME) to integrate us with all our partners, therefore codes seem to be the best solution.

One Last Thing...

There seems to be more spam than on the old setup, and we're working hard to solve that issue. Unfortunately, at the moment, we aren't able to allow users access to the moderator tools, but I'm hopeful that will happen in time.

One thing I have done is help our moderators by creating a new FME-powered Slack bot for suspicious signups:

My FME tip here is to post URLs in code blocks. The link to ban the user makes a call to FME Flow, and by default, Slack will parse that automatically, thus causing the workspace to run. By embedding it in a code block, the URL is still clickable, but it won't run automatically.

FME 2024 Fine Points

You know FME 2024 has been released, and the Feature Highlights page on the community does a great job of covering the big and important topics.

But I like to cover some of the really deep-down updates and fixes, so here are a few of them.

Schema Processing

Around FME 2022, we introduced the concept of a schema being part of a feature. In FME 2024, we've fixed a few little items that escaped our notice. For example, the AttributeCreator transformer now sets the data type according to the editor used.

If you choose the Arithmetic Editor, the data type is real64. If you choose the text editor and enter fixed-length text, you get varchar() with the length of the string.

You can see that's the case, even if the value field is empty, which is useful. If the text field includes an attribute, the type is varchar(200). Obviously, you can change the data types if necessary. I know that myAttr2 is going to be an integer, but FME doesn't know that in advance, so uses the safe option of real64.

Similarly, the DateTimeStamper transformer now creates "datetime" attributes. How could you tell, if there is no Data Type field? Well, FME 2024's new Schema Window will show us:

3D Network Support

For 2024, network-related transformers were upgraded to support 3D. That includes the NetworkTopologyCounter, StreamPriorityCalculator, and the ShortestPathFinder.

I tried it out by assigning random Z values along various lines. Run through the ShortestPathFinder in 3D mode, we do now get a different result from what 2D mode would return:

The LengthCalculator in 3D mode confirms that this is the shortest route.

On the subject of 3D, the Tiler transformer now supports tiling 3D surfaces and solids, like this example:

Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV)

As always, a lot of work went into improving FME performance. Remembering that your scenarios and data may differ from our testing data, here are some select statistics:

Attribute Transformers: Splitter, Trimmer, CaseChanger, Concatenator, LengthCalculator, Searcher, SubstringExtractor: 30% to 99% faster.

Clipper: Here's a graph of Clipper performance improvements:

Each vertical line is a different test. The upper red line is the performance of each test in 2023.2. Any test below the red line is faster; in many cases, MUCH faster. Any test below the lower green line runs at least 4x as fast as it used to. Wow!

And this is performance vs the 2023.2 version. FME 2023.2 was itself faster than 2023.1, which was faster than 2023.0, etc.

Point Clouds: Check out this animated image:

I just read 4 point cloud files and combined them into a single file. It took 1.2 seconds to complete. Look at the toolbar. Look at the log.

"Feature Caching is ON"

Wow! Many key readers and transformers for both point cloud and raster now cache data in a workable time. For contrast, 2023.2 takes 33 seconds to do the same as above. This one is the truly amazing update for me.

Plus, when you visualize this data, data inspection should be faster and smoother too!

Check out con terra's "What's New in 2024" webinar, coming up on April 18th.

Miscellaneous News

• The FME Hub test engine has been updated to 2024. This means you can now publish transformers created in 2024.
• FME 2024.1 beta builds are now available on the downloads page. Similarly, 2023.2.3 has been uploaded to the Past Versions section of the site. If you intend to stick to 2023 for the time being, this release has a few updates that you might be interested in.
• Vicrea Solutions (Netherlands) is hosting an FME event on March 26th.

• Inser (Switzerland) is hosting Advanced FME Training on April 9th and 10th.

• con terra (Espa?a) is hosting FME Accelerator Training on June 20th.

• We now have 100 Customer Stories on our website. The 100th is a video interview that discusses using FME to curate data for use in locating solar and wind farms.

• Here's a customer story from Nordend (Belgium) about improving railway track access maps for technicians.