dBase (DBF) Reader Parameters

Controls which character encoding is used to interpret text attributes from the DBF file.

If the value is not set, then the character encoding will be automatically detected from the source DBF file. If the value is set, it will take precedence over the automatically detected character encoding.

This parameter is useful when the character encoding information stored in the DBF file is missing or incorrect.

Controls whether the reader trims preceding spaces of attribute values.

• Yes – preceding spaces in attribute values are discarded.
• No – preceding spaces are left intact.

dBase store attributes in a text-based manner, so numeric attributes are converted to text before being written to disk. This parameter controls how FME reads these numeric types and influences how they will be written at the end of a transformation.

• Standard Types is the default, and this option will cause the reader to convert the text representation of numeric attributes to a binary one, choosing a size that will safely contain all possible values of the fixed-width field. This can be useful when converting from dBase to a format that supports binary storage of numbers. This is an adequate option in cases where fixed-length numbers are not a concern.
• Explicit Width and Precision will keep the attributes as fixed-length text-based fields. This option is preferred when performing a dBase-to-dBase translation, as the field widths will remain the same on write.

Use this parameter to expose Format Attributes in Workbench when you create a workspace:

• In a dynamic scenario, it means these attributes can be passed to the output dataset at runtime.
• In a non-dynamic scenario, you can use this parameter to expose additional attributes on multiple feature types.