Exporting Node Coordinates via FME

I received a query today from a reader that wants to export the node coordinates for each electric conductor sent to FME. The sw_gis!node table is not a user table in Smallworld and is therefore not typically exposed to the FME plugin. But if you use the GE FME plugin, you can make use of the pseudo_fields functionality to gather up the relevant node information and send it to FME as a conductor attribute.

The basic steps are:

1. define pseudo_fields on the conductor class (or whatever class you are interested in)
2. write Magik support code that populates the pseudo_fields with appropriate node-based coordinates.
3. create a FME Workspace that reads the new pseudo_fields and processes the appropriately.

This video describes these steps in more detail.