FME Blog

Best Practice: Emailing Spatial Query Results

Kris Majury

June 23, 2010•3 min

FME users continue to find interesting ways to integrate FME into their business processes.

FME users around the world continue to find interesting ways to integrate FME into their business processes. Andy Bates from the City of Armadale in Western Australia recently shared with us how he eliminated hours of manual work by using FME and Python scripts to automate the delivery of spatial query results. Let’s take a look…

Each time a parcel of land containing a water bore is sold, the City’s Planning Department needs to be notified. In the past, notification requests were manually created and distributed on an ad hoc basis. Today, FME plays a key role in a completely automated process.

First, to determine if there is any intersection with the City’s cadastre polygon data, FME creates points representing water bores from lat/long coordinates stored in an Excel® spreadsheet. A SQLExecutor transformer then reads a property database and integrates any ownership changes. The FME workspace also includes a StatisticsCalculator transformer to determine how many parcels containing water bores have changed ownership within the month. If no parcels have changed ownership, FME uses a Python script to automatically send an email to the Planning Department to inform them that there has been no activity. If parcels have changed ownership, then FME builds a list from the intersected data and uses Python to send a nicely formatted HTML email containing an FME-generated table of parcel details, change of ownership dates, etc. This powerful combination of FME and Python has also enabled the City’s IT team to quickly meet requests for this data in other formats like PDF and JPEG.

“Without FME, I’d have to do this entire process manually, which would be very time consuming and prone to error,” explains Andy. “The more business processes we can automate like this with FME, the better!”

Now that the City is reaping the time-saving benefits of this workflow, they are applying it to other key tasks. For example, they are using FME to email stakeholders when polygons have changed between cadastral updates, and to calculate and email statistics on their spatial data.