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Building a REST API Interface With
FMENicholas Ranicar
Front Point Consulting
Hello!My name is Nic and I work as an independent consultant specializing in FME and ETL.
I love FME because it makes my life simpler and enables me to get outdoors faster!
I have lived and worked in Calgary for the past 10 years but (full disclosure) was employed by Safe Software for 8 years in Vancouver prior to moving to Calgary.
Building a REST API Interface With FME
There are a huge number of REST API's available for communicating with everything from publicly available websites to proprietary software. This presentation describes one approach for building an interface to a REST API for use with FME.
The Challenge
How can we turn…This… Into this?
The Process
Process• Understand the REST API• Build individual component custom transformers• Combine custom transformers for common tasks• Use transformers in a workspace
Understand the REST API• Do methods represent an underlying data structure?
API link
• How are methods / responses related?• Decide which methods to implement• Determine a test tool• Postman • Web browser + dev tools• Fiddler
Build individual component custom transformers• Transformer naming convention• Determine how to use FME to call a single API
method• HTTPCaller (URL, authentication)
• Implement results handling mechanism• Can result processing code be implemented in a custom
transformer?
• Implement error handling mechanism
{"responseStatus":{
"errorCode": "Not Found","message": "Could not find a project with URN '393' (Id '393') for your organization to retrieve.","errors": []
}}
Combine custom transformers for common tasks• Make useful components by combining individual
custom transformers for common tasks• Helps to abstract implementation details in case API
changes
Use transformers in a workspace• Wrapping the API in custom FME transformers can
simplify complex workspaces• Re-useable across multiple workspaces
