Smallworld/FME Configuration Tips and Tricks

The Smallworld 2007 Americas Users Conference came to an official end yesterday evening. I had the good fortune of being able to present a paper at the conference entitled "Smallworld Core Spatial Technology and FME: Configuration Tips and Tricks". The PowerPoint slides are available for download here. If you do not have the PowerPoint application then you can view an HTML version of it that requires Internet Explorer and ActiveX by clicking here.

[NOTE: the contact information at the end of the presentation is now outdated. I now work for iFactor Consulting. You can find my new contact information in the Contact Information section on the side of this blog]

I had also agreed to help Mark Stoakes from Safe Software at his FME hands-on workshops by demonstrating the use of the Smallworld FME SOM. At both workshops my computer blue-screened just as I started the demo. That was very unfortunate because there was not enough time to debug the problem during the session. So I will be putting together a description of what I did and posting that here and on FMEpedia. (I discovered later that the problem had to do with my laptop being connected to a docking station which received intermittent power and therefore somehow messed up the parallel port on which my Smallworld license dongle was connected.)

If you received a GE USB Stick in your swag bag and, like me, were not at the session where the password was revealed, try '1111'.

ACEs, ACEs, everywhere

I recently tried to make a copy of an ACE in the Physical Network Inventory (PNI) product. The out-of-the-box ACE is called "Physical NI User". So I thought that all I needed to do was make a copy of that ACE, call it something like "Physical NI User New", and then modify the application registration code to include...

:ace_name,"Physical NI User New"


Apparently that was not enough. If you want to have two user groups use different ACEs, you definitely need to change the application registration :ace_name. But you also need to change the ACE name in the following XML configuration files:

in a suitable application config.xml file

• verify config/framework_data/map_type[@ace_name] has the name you are expecting
• verify config/plugins/plugin[@class_name="pni_editor_manager"]/property[@name="ace_name"]["value"] has the name you are expecting
• verify config/plugins/plugin[@class_name="document_manager"]/document/document_properties/property[@name="ace_name"]["value"] has the name you are expecting

In addition, if you have specified any bookmarks for an ACE, they are "hardcoded" for the ACE in which they were originally created.

The typical symptom which indicates that some of the above-mentioned ACE settings are incorrect is the one where you look at the object control plugin and notice that the v/h/s settings are not what you thought you had set them to in the current ACE. Most likely you did set the v/h/s settings correctly but one or more of your application configurations are still pointing to an ACE that you are not expecting it to.

See you at the Americas Users conference

The Smallworld 2007 Americas Users Conference is coming up in less than one week near Denver, Colorado. I look forward to seeing many of you there. Hopefully we will learn a lot about the new Smallworld/Oracle initiatives.

I will be presenting a paper on Tuesday entitled "Smallworld and FME: Configuration Tips and Tricks". Safe Software will be presenting some good hands-on workshops about how to use their FME tool so I won't be covering that territory again. But I will be presenting how to get your Smallworld system set up with the FME interface so that you can do the cool things that Safe Software will show you in the workshops. I also plan to give a short FME SOM (Spatial Object Manager) demonstration during one of the FME workshops.

If I don't see you at the presentation or workshop, please feel free to come by and say "hello" at the Red Planet Consulting booth where I will be during the exhibition times.

See you there!