Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson, you’ll be able to:

• Explain why collaboration is key to data integration projects.
• Explain what the Compare tool does.
• Understand when to use the Compare tool in your work.

Collaboration is Key

"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships."

- Michael Jordan

A similar adage could be applied to authoring data integration workflows with FME: “You can build a good workspace in isolation, but you can build a great one by collaborating with your teammates and stakeholders.”

Collaboration is vital in data integration projects. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson from the Harvard Business Review report that the average business team size has increased from 20 to 100 members. With this increase in scale, effective and efficient collaboration becomes simultaneously more challenging and critical.

Additionally, Philip Russom, Senior Manager at TDWI Research, argues that collaboration is essential because data integration involves bringing together a variety of technical specialists. Data integration projects are often as much about integrating the workflows of diverse stakeholders as they are about integrating the data itself. He points out several trends that make collaboration even more critical:

• More teams are working on data integration projects.
• Data integration requires connecting many data sources and applications.
• Data integration professionals are increasingly working remotely.
• Data integration often must collaborate with other data management disciplines.
• Staff on the business side of organizations are getting more involved in data integration projects.
• Data integration teams often must work with data governance committees and other oversight bodies.

These industry changes require you to build robust systems for collaborating and tracking changes to your workflows. Even as a solo system integrator, tracking the changes to your workspace over time is key to accurate data delivery.

The Compare Tool

The Compare tool in FME Workbench helps you manage collaboration securely, reliably, and intuitively.

This tool allows you to review the differences between two workspaces or exported custom transformers across all major non-cosmetic workflow components, including added/modified/deleted:

• Readers
• Reader feature types
• Writers
• Writer feature types
• Transformers
• User parameters
• FME Flow parameters
• Workspace parameters
• Connection paths
• Junctions

After comparing files, you can choose which parts you want to keep from both.

Building workflows to automate integration tasks is not enough; you must maintain them. FME is flexible and offers a low barrier to building complex solutions; this means that users from various departments within an organization could build or contribute to a given FME workspace. Additionally, you might work with contractors or solutions providers and need to exchange workspaces to iterate upon them. The Compare tool lets you do this quickly and effectively.

The Comparison tool is available in FME 2023.0 or newer and has more functionality than the previous Workspace Compare and Merge tool released in FME 2022. For information on Workspace Compare and Merge, please see the 2022 version of this course.

Use Cases

When might you want to use the Compare tool? Consider the following list of use cases. Do any apply to your work with FME?

• You follow best practices by using a version control system with your workspaces. This process could be as simple as renaming workspace files with different update dates or versions, e.g., “workspace-2022-05-19.fmw,” “workspace-2022-05-20.fmw,” etc. While workspace files are plain text (XML), it’s not easy to track and compare changes that way since the file is structured so FME Workbench can read it. This tool solves the problem! You can quickly load up different versions, compare them, and choose which changes to keep.
• You often share workspaces with your colleagues and use external documentation, screenshots, or videos to track and explain changes. This manual method of comparison can be time-consuming and inaccurate.  The Compare tool offers a more streamlined way to collaborate.
• You maintain separate versions of workspaces or custom transformers locally, on a shared network drive, or in FME Flow repositories. Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell which version is most up-to-date. Now, you can download the workspace from FME Flow and compare it to your local version to ensure your FME Flow workflows stay up-to-date.

⭐ New in FME 2023.0, you can integrate Git into your Workbench comparison workflow. You can use the command line, TortoiseGit, or Sourcetree to interface directly with the Compare tool.

The Compare tool is separate from the existing version control system in FME Flow, but you can use these tools in tandem. For example, you could pull down version 1 of a workspace from FME Flow, make some changes, view the changes by comparing them to version 1 to confirm they are correct, and then publish the workspace to FME Flow as version 2.