Handling Nothing

Besides representing all forms of nothing in its interface, FME also allows nothing to be a condition in various tests, lets users set nothing values, and allows bulk updates from one form of nothing to another.

Recognizing Null Values

Various formats have various ways to represent nothing. But, if they support the concept of null, then FME will read any null attributes with a <null> value.

For a workspace to check for incoming nulls, the Tester transformer has specific operators to test for null, empty, and missing values:

Because the Tester interface is incorporated into many facets of FME (such as the TestFilter transformer) you can test for nulls wherever you find that interface.

Other Null-Handling Transformers

Many other transformers also allow testing for nulls. For example, the Matcher transformer has options as to whether null values constitute a match:

This parameter lets the workspace author decide whether null, empty, and missing values should be treated as different values.

If set to No, then two features can match even if one has an attribute that is <null> and the other has an attribute that is <missing>.

If set to Yes, then two features can only match when their attributes are the same type of nothing; i.e. when <null> one on feature is matched by <null> on the other.

Another example is the AttributeFilter transformer, which has separate output ports for <Empty>, <Missing>, and <Null>:

Writing Null Values

It's often important to be able to test for and filter null values as part of a data validation process, or when a null value would cause problems in a calculation.

However, it's also important to be able to filter out null values for writing data. That's because what happens when an attribute set to null is sent to a writer depends very much upon the data format.

If the format supports <null> then the destination dataset will contain <null> attributes.

If the format doesn’t support <null>, then FME will automatically convert the data to the closest representation that is supported.

For example, MapInfo TAB does not have a concept of <null>; instead text attributes are not written (so FME will read them back as <missing>) and numeric attributes are written as -9999 (which is a MapInfo equivalent to null).