Notifications and Workspaces

Workspaces are what make FME Server the ideal engine for Spatial Data notifications

Message Transformation

The simplest setup for the FME Server Notification Service is an incoming message (Publication) tagged with a specific topic that gets passed as an outgoing message to any Subscription registered with that topic:

However, that scenario does not include any transformation – restructuring – of the message contents. If the message needs to be processed in some way then an FME workspace can be employed between Publication and Subscription.

A workspace is the key functionality of FME and with one you can read spatial data from a message, in almost any format, carry out spatial transformations on that data, and then pass on the results to a set of subscribers.

This blend of live messaging with Spatial ETL is unique.

In this scenario a workspace is literally a Subscriber to the incoming Publication, and receives the message content from it. The workspace then acts as a Publisher, sending an outgoing message to any Subscribers.

Partial System

Of course, the above diagram shows the full potential of a notification system. It would be just as appropriate to have a system that triggered a workspace in response to a Publication, but without the workspace sending an outgoing message:

For example, a publication triggers a workspace that writes the incoming data to a database.

Similarly, it’s just as appropriate to have a workspace that is run by some other means, and which sends an outgoing message to a Subscription when it is complete:

For example, a workspace might be started as a scheduled task. When the task is complete FME sends a notification email to inform an administrator.