Just to add to what's been said already: > As I think you've realized, once features are read, they generally > stay in that order throughout the workspace; that's quite important > for some formats such as DGN, and some transformers work better when > you can assume features are processed in this order. You can change > the order using a Sorter, and of course merging/splitting streams of > data may cause a change of order.
This is completely correct. And unlike the Ghostbusters, there's no danger when you "cross the streams" (http://tinyurl.com/rt5jp) Most commonly, the Sorter is used to do a meaningless sort if all you want to do is stop-up a stream for some reason. GlobalVariable setting/retrieving is also a way to do something like what the feature-merger can do -- in the example here, the roads themselves could go through straight away unfettered, and after the filtering, a global variable could be set to YES for each NODE ID that should be saved. Simultaneously, the nodes would go into a sorter to STOP them up, and when they came out (which would happen after all the input data of any kind was read) then a global variable retriever could be used to check if there was a global variable for the node id with the value yes. Okay, it is tricky to set this up in workbench 'cause I just checked and the global variable names are asked for as if they are constants, but you can go behind FME's back and use &ATTRIBUTE_NAME in place of where the constant should have been to set a global variable whose name is taken from the value of an attribute, in this case, called ATTRIBUTE_NAME. But why I was really responding to this post was so that I could point out one other obscure thing, that rarely should matter, but is interesting nonetheless. If you have multiple connection links coming out of a single output port of a transformer or source feature type, the FIRST one you connected or drew is the first one that will fire, that is, where data will flow. And as soon as that feature has gone as far as it can, the second link drawn will have a feature sent down it. Normally one would not care about this but there are some obscure cases where it can make a difference (such as when writing to tables that have foreign key constraints on them, or when global variables are involved). Good questions. Dale Join us at the FME Worldwide User Conference Sept. 21-22, 2006 Vancouver BC Canada. For more information, visit www.safe.com/2006uc. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fme/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
