From the course: FME Desktop: Data Translation for AEC

Overview of FME Desktop components

From the course: FME Desktop: Data Translation for AEC

Start my 1-month free trial

Overview of FME Desktop components

“

- In this video, we're going to look at the three main components that make up FME desktop. The first one, the one that does all the heavy lifting is FME Workbench. This is the tool that you'll use 90% of the time. This is a tool that allows you to translate almost anything to anything. The fastest way to get to use it, is to hit the generate button and choose what you want to translate. As soon as you click generate inside the FME Workbench, you'll see the format that you want to translate. Is we got more formats, and there's all sorts of things from Adobe geospatial, all the way to XML and everything in between, and we can export anything. So for example, the writer could be CityGML or DWG or whatever you want. So, the primary tool here is to generate a workspace between two different data sets. And once you do that, it'll create it. Now we can also hit new and manually insert a new reader, add a new reader, you pick what kind do you want to use? And then what kind of writer? So what do you want to translate it to? And then you add a writer and then in between we have transformers. That's why they're in the menu, you have reader, transformer, writer. So those three things are the most important tools inside the Workbench. You read your data, you transform it in some way, modify it in some kind of way and then write it back out to something else. And that's pretty much it inside a Workbench. Now there's a lot of tools in here, the most important thing about the FME workbench is ability to read all sorts of spatial data types, transform it in some way, and then write it back out. And that's the workbench, that's your workhorse. Now another tool we have is the Data Inspector. This tool is pretty much a read-only tool for looking at data. Primarily this is used to look at things, for example, if I wanted to look at a KML file, I can just open up a KML and sure enough, it'll load the data set, and I can interrogate this. I can zoom in and I can pick on items and it can tell me if the attribute data that's associated with it and all the other data that's associated with such as the layer it's on and so on, what's the details, what all that sort of thing. So this happens to be a KML file and you can see the coordinate system and so on. So this is a very powerful way to review your data, where the Workbench you got to work and translate and manipulate, the Inspectors very simple, it's sole purpose is to interrogate your data and understand what you're working with. Now, the third application, the one that somewhere between these two, right between the Inspector and the Workbench is the Quick Translator. The nice thing about the Quick Translator it's quick. So all you basically do is you read your data set and then export it out with a writer, you have a reader and a writer and that's really its purpose is to quickly translate from one format to another. So you don't need to use your FME Workbench to do a simple translation. You can use the Quick Translator, and that's whole purpose. If you're not going to be manipulating the data with a transformer or anything, this is a beautiful tool, it's very simple. You input one type and you export it another. So we have three tools, we have the Workbench for 90% of the heavy lifting, the Inspector for reviewing and interrogating your data. And finally, the Quick Translator that's used to translate from one type to another.

Contents