FME Template

The ability to save workspaces as templates was added in FME 2011.

If you keep preforming the same actions, for example use a reader's bounding box settings, then this is something you should consider.

A template is basically a saved workspace, in which you can have as many transformers and readers in it as you like or none at all.

None at all? well yes actually the one I use the most doesn't have any transformers (yet) and only one reader and an inspector.

If you are a heavy database user then consider the following:

• You constantly need to access data from different services with different users/passwords and you want a to spatially select the data and tables from where the data comes from.

You can create a workspace from scratch each time, but if you hate repetitive and not particularity efficient tasks (like me) then a template can save you lots of time (which you can spend on the fun part = transformation)

To make the template as flexible as possible I make use of many parameters (private and published).
These parameters assist me to define the database service, user name, password, feature types (tables), where clause and location (bounding box) when running the workspace (prompt and run)

Prompt window

The only action I actually have to do is to select my translation source parameters and run, viola!