After completing this lesson, you’ll be able to:
Learning content in the FME Academy presents a user's story addressing their data integration challenges with FME. You should follow along with their actions using your installation of FME (2026.1 or later) or request an on-demand virtual machine in the footer link below. Some lessons will require you to follow their steps or take additional steps to answer a quiz question.
A Resources section will provide links to interactive tutorials and starting workspaces when necessary.
In this lesson, you will:
A feature type in FME corresponds to a single sheet in a spreadsheet, table in a database, or a single layer (geometry plus attributes) in spatial data. Feature types are children of readers or writers, so we refer to them as reader feature types or writer feature types.
Sven works as a Planning Analyst for a city’s economic development department. He has been given an Excel spreadsheet containing the point locations of businesses and needs to load it into an Esri geodatabase. He will use this business data to create guides for each city neighborhood to provide to residents, prospective business owners, and tourists.
Sven is starting with an Excel workbook (BusinessOwners.xlsx) with a single sheet. Each row is a separate business and contains information about the business, including the owner's name, the company name, the business license number, and the business’s primary address. He wants to keep all this information in his new geodatabase. Here are two sample rows of his data.
|
First |
Last Name |
Company |
License Number |
Longitude |
Latitude |
|
Elvis |
Clay |
Diam Industries |
B347A2 |
-123.101472 |
49.2480941 |
|
Noelani |
Curry |
Mus Donec Associates |
1991FF |
-123.1318356 |
49.28042851 |
Most FME Academy courses assume you can access FME Form and FME Flow. You should follow along with their actions using your installation of FME (2026.1 or later) or request an on-demand virtual machine. Some lessons contain an additional exercise that challenges you to take additional steps independently.
If you need access to FME, you can:
- Ask your administrator for a license
- Request a Work Extension license if you want to use FME for training outside of work
- Request an on-demand virtual machine to gain temporary access to FME
- Purchase FME
If you don’t have access to FME, some courses provide step-by-step tutorials you can follow to see the workflow in action. However, some Quizzes will require FME access to answer the questions.
All the data you need for the training is provided as links in the relevant lessons. If you want to download sample data, use the FME data repository (also on GitHub). Unless otherwise stated, the data used here originates from open data made available by the City of Vancouver in British Columbia. It contains information licensed under the Open Government License - Vancouver.
The Microsoft Excel Parameters dialog controls how the Excel file will be read, including which sheet(s) to read. The Preview section displays how FME sees the data, while the Attributes section displays the attributes (spreadsheet columns, in this case) that FME detected. FME automatically detected the Longitude and Latitude attributes as X and Y coordinates and set them appropriately (under the Type column). You can also manually set these, if necessary. FME will automatically create points using these attributes when it reads the spreadsheet.
Some datasets store geometry information, and some do not. In this case, the source Excel file contained spatial data (latitude and longitude coordinates) describing the location of the address associated with each business license. However, in Excel, these coordinates are stored as numbers. The dataset needs to store geometry separate from its attributes to create a spatial dataset that can be analyzed and manipulated using FME or a GIS.
The Attribute Definition looks correct; FME will use the Longitude and Latitude attributes to automatically create points. However, for these points to appear correctly on a map, FME needs to know which coordinate system they are using. If you were reading from a spatial format like an Esri Shapefile, FME could read the coordinate system information directly. But Excel doesn't store that information, so you need to tell FME which coordinate system to use.
Here is a visual example of how FME components relate to Excel components. In the image below:
The components of a workspace are represented in FME Workbench as follows. In the image below:
The total hierarchy of components in FME Workbench looks like this:
A Translation Parameter Values dialog appears to confirm some parameters. This dialog can be helpful if you want to change parameters before he runs his workspace.
Being prompted to fill in the parameter values lets you rerun a workspace with different parameters. For example, you may convert several datasets using the same workspace running multiple times or testing if a workspace runs successfully with different input data. You may disable this prompt by clicking the drop-down triangle beside Run in the toolbar and deselecting Prompt for User Parameters.
After the workspace runs and the data is read, the Translation Log reports what FME did during the translation and whether the translation was successful. It's likely the Translation Log will only show for a moment; step 8 explains why.
The Translation Log is displayed as a sortable table. You can click the hyperlinked transformer name to navigate to the element on the canvas producing the message. This ability to identify where errors are occurring makes debugging workspaces more efficient.
On the BusinessOwners feature type, the new green icon represents a local copy of all the spreadsheet's features. It is called a feature cache, and you can click it to inspect the data. Caches store all the features from a particular port, represented by the green magnifying glass icon.
Data Preview displays the contents of the cache: a table containing all of the spreadsheet data. The total number of rows (features) is shown in the bottom right of Table View. Graphics View displays the spatial data, which, in this case, are points. If you had the BusinessOwners feature cache selected, Data Preview will show the data as soon as the workspace finishes running, which explains why you may have only seen the Translation Log briefly.
If you are taking a Safe Software-hosted training course, we have the background map enabled by default. If you don't see a background map, we'll show you how to configure one in a later lesson.
Data Preview is an embedded version of a standalone program included with FME Form, the FME Data Inspector. You can use this separate program if you prefer to have a full-screen application when inspecting data. The FME Data Inspector can view any format that FME can read.
Sven also wants to include data about public art in his neighborhood guides.
Help him by adding another Excel reader to connect to all the sheets (feature types) in this public art Excel workbook (C:\FMEData\Data\Culture\PublicArt.xlsx). The steps are the same; use the new URL, and don't forget to set the Coordinate System to LL84 again. You don’t need to download the file; you can paste the URL into the Dataset parameter of the Add Reader dialog.
The workbook contains one sheet per neighborhood. When prompted, add all the feature types. Each row is a public art installation and contains information about the location, the piece's title, and its longitude and latitude. Your canvas should now look like the image below.
