Automation Protocols

Email and FME Workspace protocols are among the most popular in FME Server, and they are covered in detail in the next few sections. Some other commonly used protocols are:

Watch Triggers

There are several watch triggers: Directory Watch and FTP Watch are the two most common but other watch services include Amazon S3 buckets and Dropbox directories.

These are trigger-only protocols that monitor folders and FTP sites for any changes, whether that be new files to be added, or existing files modified or deleted. When FME Server sees a change the trigger message contains the affected file path value.

A common, and perhaps the primary use case is the ability to monitor a folder where datasets are stored. When a new dataset is placed in this folder, FME Server Automations will parse this file path into a workspace to process the data with no need for any manual intervention.

This protocol allows files to be filtered by the action type so that it is not just the creation of a new file that can be monitored. It's also possible to monitor for existing file deletions and modifications.

Some of these watch trigger types have corresponding action protocols whereby FME Server can push files out to that file storage location.

Mobile Notifications

Mobile notifications are action-only protocols that send messages to mobile devices. The two protocols available are Apple Push Notification and Google Cloud Messaging.

Apple Devices

The Apple Push action allows delivery of messages to an Apple iOS device, like an iPhone. Messages are sent from FME Server to the device via a cloud service called the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).

The FME Server Reference Manual explains how to set up such a notification and what is required regarding Apple “SSL Keystore” and device tokens.

Android Devices

Google Cloud Messaging is the Android equivalent to Apple notifications. Again, they involve sending content to a mobile device from an FME Server Action.

Amazon Triggers/Actions

FME Server Automations support several Amazon protocols. SNS and SQS are two types of notification systems. FME Server is capable of pushing messages to both of them and receiving messages from both of them. The difference (if you are interested) is that SNS pushes messages to triggers immediately, whereas SQS stores the messages in a queue until the trigger fetches them.

Amazon S3 is an online file storage service. It can be either a trigger or action in FME Server; for example, FME can be notified to read from S3 "buckets" and can issue a notification in the form of writing to an S3 bucket. The S3 Trigger also falls under the "Watch" type category.

WebSocket Notifications

A WebSocket is a TCP-based line of communication. FME Server can accept and send messages from/to another WebSocket client. WebSocket protocols are supported by most web browsers, meaning any web application can communicate to FME Server and FME Server can send notifications (even small quantities of data) directly to any web browser.