We all try to use best practices throughout our FME development (you do, don’t you??) but sometimes in the midst and excitement of workspace authoring, we forget to tie up some basic loose ends. Disorganized and undocumented workspaces are hard to work with, and even harder to debug, so do your future self and your colleagues a favor and make sure it is up to snuff! Doing a quick workspace validation at the end of the project will help make sure your workspace is understandable, easy to debug, and ready for future modification and evolution.
As a reminder, we’ve started a personal checklist to go through when wrapping up a project, to make sure that no mess gets left behind. Here are some of the things on our list…
Check your documentation: Bookmarks and Annotation
Make sure your workspace is well documented! Chances are you already can’t remember why some of those transformers are there, so before you completely forget, write it down in an annotation.
Clean up parameters: Published and private
User parameters can become very confusing if you don’t keep them clean. Give them names and prompts that have meaning for the workspace, and get rid of ones you don’t need.
Delete unnecessary transformers (especially Inspectors!)
Remember to remove all inspectors, disabled transformers that are no longer needed.
File structure organization: archive unneeded files and old versions.
Archive old versions of the workspace and any additional files. Make sure that your files are well organized in a project structure. If you do move things around, make sure to test that everything still connects up properly!
Example file structure provided by Safe Software:
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