[fme] RE: Order of features read -- was SpatialFilter Usage

[Dale Lutz]

Hello Jason, others,   This was a fascinating thread, filled with hockey references (and training camp is only just starting up this week!).   But the root of it I think is a bit unfortunate.  From what I can tell the contentious issue was about the order of features flowing into things, and the fact that if you’re doing clipping or spatialfiltering, you’re MUCH BETTER off if somehow you can get the clipper/filter features to arrive first than they straggle through the door at some point mid translation.   So, a few comments:   1)    We should emphasize this fact in the documentation for the Clipper and SpatialFilter – by way of this email I’m asking that this be done 2)    We should then also give a description of how you can control the feature order in workbench – there actually is an obvious and blatant way of doing it, but folks may not know.  I’ll describe it below. 3)    In general, the order that links are drawn shouldn’t be something we’d want people to care about.  That is a bit subtle, but I am willing to entertain ideas on how we could make that more explicit if people think it is useful to know/control. For example, we could have a mode where each link gets a tiny annotation number (1,2,3 etc) as it emerges from a port to tell you its order in how the feature copies will shoot out.  I think we have technology to do this, probably it would be an advanced option, because again, I mostly think people shouldn’t have to worry about that expect in rare cases. (I’m interested in feedback on this idea, perhaps in its own thread here on the list, or in person at the UC next week).   RE: #2, the recommended way to get the clippers/filters into factories first is just to set up a reader for them, and make that reader the first reader.  You can control the order that the features are read – they are read from each reader in order from top to bottom as they are listed in the navigation pane, and indeed, the writers are written to in the order they are listed in the navigation pane.  You can move readers/writers up and down as need be in the navigation pane not by dragging unfortunately, but by right clicking on them and saying move up or down.   If you are reading a database to get both the clippers and clippees, then use 2 readers on the same database, one choosing the clipper table, and the second one choosing the clippee table.  Then the order of things is explicit and not surprising.   Should we number the readers and writers in the navigation pane to drive home this point?   All feedback welcomed as we, like the Borg, strive for perfection.         Dale   ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dale Lutz              Safe Software Inc.                 [EMAIL PROTECTED] VP Development         Surrey, BC, CANADA        phone: (604) 501-9985                        http://www.safe.com         fax: (604) 501-9965 ----------------------------------------------------------------------   __._,_.___ Join us at the FME Worldwide User Conference Sept. 21-22, 2006 Vancouver BC Canada. For more information, visit www.safe.com/2006uc.  Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe __,_._,___