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Disabling Connections

You can temporarily disable selected workspace connections.

This is a useful feature, for example, if you are testing a large workspace and want to isolate or simplify some functionality. Another advantage, when disabling multiple connections, is that you do not have to disconnect them to temporarily exclude them from the workspace. It is sometimes easier to disable selected connections than to disable feature types, since a feature type may be linked to several different areas in the workspace.

To disable connections, right-click on a single connection, or select multiple connections and right-click. Select Disable from the command menu. This disables the selected connections on the canvas (the gray color indicates they are not active), and a new Disabled Connections object displays in the Navigator:

To re-enable a connection, select it either in the workspace or in the Navigator, right-click, and select Enable.

If you select an area on the canvas that includes both connections and objects (feature types or transformers), the command menu displays a choice: either disable selected objects or disable selected connections:

Disabled Connections in the Navigator Pane

Clicking a disabled connection in the Navigator selects it on the canvas. You can also right-click a connection to:

delete the connection,
re-enable the connection,
add a breakpoint,
auto-connect attributes (useful if there is a clear relationship between attribute names),
insert an AttributeCopierCopies existing attributes to new attributes with the specified names. The existing attribute remains and a new attribute is created that has a different name, but the same value. For more information, see the AttributeCopier in the FME Transformer help topic, or in the Description pane on the Workbench canvas. or LoggerLogs each feature to the translation log. transformer,
add an annotation.

Re-enabling Connections

To re-enable connections, right-click on the disabled connection(s) in the Navigator pane, or on the canvas, and choose Enable.