Working Environment
Setting up our work space
Using Web Feature Services (WFS) means, that you'll deal with text documents, so it would be a good idea to have the right tools at your fingertips.
Text documents? Why this?
The reason is, that Web Feature Services normally will return some kind of Geography Markup Language (GML) documents. And GML is nothing else than XML ... and XML is - you guess it: a structured text document.
In case something goes wrong, it may happen, that the Web Feature Service returns a html document containing an error description or any other message. Html documents are also text documents.
Remember: nearly anything a WFS returns will be a text document!
In case the document has no file extension like
*.gml
*.xml
*.html
don't worry about it! Just save it to your local drive. You should be able to open it using a text editor!
Having this in mind, our toolbox should contain
Regarding FME, you should allways turn on 2 things in FME Workbench before you start:
Translation Log (View --> Windows --> Translation Log)
Feature Caching (Run --> Enable Feature Caching)
We will inspect the Translation Log over and over again later on. So the Translation Log will be your friend!
Feature Caching will save time, network traffic and maybe trouble with the WFS provider while exploring things.
Lizard, chameleon, firefox ... welcome to the jungle!
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