Chamber of Workspace Horrors
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Best Practice
In general terms Best Practice means the best way of doing something; in other words carrying out a task in the most effective and efficient manner.
For FME, Workspaces are rarely static and used repeatedly without being edited; sooner or later the source or destination schema will change, or edits will be needed to take advantage of new or updated FME functionality.
Best Practice makes it easier to navigate an existing workspace and understand how it has been designed, and thus simplifies the editing process.
Chamber of Workspace Horrors
Of course, the support team at Safe sometimes has to decipher some workspaces that are definitely not created with Best Practice in mind - and in fact we are often just as guilty as our users of putting together a workspace without really thinking about the consequences of our actions.
The Chamber of Workspace Horrors is where we like to store these bad examples, as a reminder that it's often worth taking a little extra time to ensure a long-lasting and scalable solution.
NB: To any user whose workspace we feature here - don't feel bad. There's no offence intended, and the majority of examples are from Safe employees!
Exhibit A - The Giant Spider
Cock your head to one side and this first horror looks like a giant spider - either that or a bunch of invading Martians from War of the Worlds. This was the preliminary implementation of a project by Safe's Pro Services team, which we soon cleaned up to look a lot better.
Above: This example makes the classic mistakes of criss-crossing connectors, no annotation and duplicating sections.
Exhibit B - Crossed Lines
Another (hang our heads in shame) Pro Services workspace, though admittedly it isn't the worst workspace you will see.
Above: This example criss-crosses connectors till they look like spaghetti. At least it has some good annotation.
Exhibit C - The Magic Eye
I spent all afternoon crossing my eyes trying to see this in 3D - then I realized that there wasn't a hidden image in there, just a poorly designed workspace.
Above: The worst thing here is the repeating sections that are doing similar actions over and over and over again.
Exhibit D - The Sailing Ship
Heave ho me hearties, and hoist the sails on this workspace's rigging. Individual links can have annotation attached, and it would have helped in this case.
Above: Examining this workspace up close makes your eyes water with all its crossed connections
Exhibit E - What's a Fanout?
When you have multiple input and output feature types like this workspace, you should really consider using a merge filter on the source and a fanout on the destination.
Above: With a merge filter and fanout this workspace could be condensed down to just 1 input and 1 output feature type.
Exhibit F - Constellation of the Swimmer
The connections aren't so bad here (just a few crossing lines) but most users would be able to read this better if it was organized on a more grid-like arrangement. With the randomly spaced objects it looks more like a star chart. Remember that most users will read this left-to-right, so try to avoid connections that go right-to-left
Above: You can use View > Snap to Grid in Workbench to automatically get your transformers nicely lined up.
