Tutorial: Getting Started with FME Server

Article by MitaAtSafe · Jan 21, 2016 at 11:36 PM · edited · Apr 08 at 06:37 PM

Article created with FME Server 2019.0

Introduction

Welcome to FME Server! This tutorial will give you hands-on experience with the basics of FME Server. It is comprised of 4 parts:

- Take a Tour of the Web Interface (current article)

- Publish a Workspace to FME Server and Run It

- Create Self-Serve Access to Data with FME Server

- Schedule a Workspace to Run with FME Server

In part 1 of this tutorial, you'll learn what FME Server is, tour the Web User Interface, and run a sample workspace. Please note that this video was created with FME Server 2018.0, the interface may vary in other versions of FME.

Prerequisites

If you’d like to follow along with your own FME Server, here are the prerequisites:

a) FME Server must be installed

Visit our website for a Free 60 Day Trial of FME Server

b) FME Server must be licensed

See FME Server Licensing Walk-Through if you have not yet licensed FME Server.

c) FME Desktop must be installed and licensed

Visit our website for a Free Trial of FME Desktop

d) Sample workspaces and data

Click here to download the data for this tutorial

1. Take a Tour of the FME Server Web Interface

a) Open Web Interface

You can open the Web User Interface in a couple of different ways:

Type in http://localhost as a URL in a browser window
Type in your hostname/fmeserver as the URL in a browser window (the hostname was specified during the installation)
Access it from the Windows Start menu. Find FME Server in the Programs list and click on Web User Interface

b) Log In

For the purpose of this tutorial, log in with the default author/author username/password that gets set up with the installation. If you changed the username and password during installation, log in with that username. Otherwise use the default:

username = author

password = author

Notice as well there are helpful links below the login fields, including to another beginner tutorial, the Quickstart tour.

c) Take a Tour

In the main view are panels showing Help with links to various topics, Recent Jobs, Recent Projects, Favorite Workspaces, and Last Published Workspaces. Most of these panels are empty because this is a fresh installation.

On the left hand side is a panel with the web interface menu of FME Server.

Clicking FME Server will always bring you back to this home page.
The first grouping, which includes Run Workspace, allows a user to select and manage jobs and resources available to that user.
If you are logged in as an administrator, under the Admin grouping are a number of options for configuring FME Server.

The top right corner contains a Help button for links to documentation and articles, including resources for developers. Next to that is the User Settings button.

Lastly, at the very bottom left you can find information about the build and version of your FME Server. If you don’t see this, mouse over the grey menu panel on the left-hand side and scroll down.

2. Run a Sample Workspace

Run one of the sample workspaces from the web interface:

a) Click on the Run Workspace button.

This is where we can select a workspace already published to FME Server and run it.

b) Choose the Repository the workspace is in

You can think of a repository as a folder in which to store related items. FME Server comes with three repositories pre-installed: Dashboards (which contains several workspaces that run daily by default to track server performance), Tools and Samples. We are just interested in the Samples repository, so select it.

c) Choose which Workspace to Run

The Workspace drop down lists the workspaces within the Samples repository. Select austinApartments.fmw.

d) Select the Service with which to run the workspace

We’ll discuss services some more when we publish and register our own workspace in part 3. For now, select the Data Streaming service.

e) Click on Run (bottom right)

When the job is ready the button will turn green, after the workspace is executed by FME the result, a kmz file in this case, will be downloaded through the browser. Feel free to view the downloaded data by opening it in Google Earth or FME Data Inspector.