Publish workspace feature

[dimitrios-michelakis-fr]

Hi everyone, this is a cool project! Very well done!

First of all - is this repo actively maintained? If yes; a feature for publishing workspaces would be the bomb.

Kind regards,
D.

[mdeabreuatsafe]

Hello Dimitrios,

Thank you for your kind words, I've passed them on to the team!

This repo is maintained, fixes and features are added though I cannot promise a timeline. I've filed FMEFLOWCLI-77 in our internal ticket tracking system and we'll update this issue with any updates.

Thanks,
Matthew

[dimitrios-michelakis-fr]

Great news @mdeabreuatsafe!

To provide some context, the organisation I work for, Forest Research (FR) in Great Britain, now uses both FME Form and FME Flow as part of our core technology stack. Alongside ESRI, Python, GDAL, and other bespoke software, we use these tools to build and maintain data pipelines that are managed in a GitHub monorepo. Our GitHub branching is typical - i.e., local branch -> remote branch -> dev -> release -> main. All repository content is tested using unit tests & GitHub actions. As a result an FME workspace must go through the above process.

Introducing an FME Flow publish CLI feature would enable us to automatically publish to FME Flow all FME Form workspaces contained within a released version of our data pipeline monorepo through GitHub Actions. This approach would allow us to preserve our current development and release processes while also taking full advantage of FME Flow’s orchestration and automation features.

P.S. 1 - I have explored integrating our GitHub repository directly with FME Flow using the existing UI-based version control features. However, these are significantly limited (for example, they do not support branching), which makes them unsuitable for our established development and release workflows.

P.S. 2 - Also open to other suggestions or workarounds!

Happy to provide more information if needed!

Kind regards,
D.

[mdeabreuatsafe]

Very cool workflow! Thanks for the details. I'd suggest reaching out to support@safe.com, I've pinged them internally to keep an eye out for your email. They'd be happy to chat about your current workflows and any limitations that might be suitable for future feature development and paths forward for the time being.

In the mean time, as a workaround. I'd suggest you take a look at the REST API for FME Flow. It contains a couple endpoints which might be of value including the /workspaces/{repository}/upload endpoint which will allow you to upload a given workspace and /workspaces/{repository}/{workspace}/resources allowing you to upload any associated resources for your workspaces.
Here is the documentation for the REST API V4, you'll want to click over to the 'API Endpoints' tab and then expand the "repositories" section.

Edit: I'll note this may not be as easy depending on the complexity of your workspace, FME Form does a fair amount of work behind the scenes when publishing workspaces.

Thanks,
Matthew