The FME Data Inspector has a number of controls to assist in showing the data in an orderly manner.
Management of feature display order is carried out in the Display Control window.
Each dataset and feature type can be dragged above any other to promote its display order in the View window.
Feature Types can only be ordered within their container dataset.
For example, "Private" cannot be promoted above "Parks" in the display, without the entire Roads dataset being promoted above Parks.
Each level of the Display Control window has a checkbox to turn data on and off at that level.
Each feature type can be assigned a different color or style that applies to its geometriesTo access this functionality click on the style icon for that feature type in the Display Control window:
The Drawing Style dialog allows you to set the color of a feature and its degree of transparency. The exact settings available depend upon the type of geometry being set; for example a polygon feature will have settings for both fill and border:
Each Feature Type in the Display Control window is tagged with the number of features it contains, in parentheses after the feature type name.
Thus we can see that there are 957 arterial road links in the city of Vancouver.
The FME Data Inspector has a number of miscellaneous functions that help users navigate through data, investigate data, and even translate data to a different format!
Press the Shift key on the keyboard and it will activate the zoom-in tool in the Inspector.
Press the Ctrl key and it will activate the zoom-out tool. Release the key to revert to the previous tool.
This functionality allows users to quickly move between query and navigation modes at the press of a key, so there’s no need to click between query and navigation tools on the menubar or toolbar.
The FME Data Inspector save tool lets you save whatever data is currently being displayed in the view window. The data can be saved in any FME-supported format of your choice.
Simply select File > Save Data As to open the prompt for saving data.
Data in the View window can be filtered by a set of user-defined criteria to show only the features that are required at the time. This functionality is activated by Tools > Filter Features on the menubar.
The Filter Features dialog allows a whole series of test clauses to be set up, using a number of operators to test the values of source data attributes. For example, here the user is filtering (keeping displayed) all features that are located in the neighborhood of Kitsilano.
