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Esri Shapefile Writer: User Attributes

For information on the parameters in this dialog that are specific to all formats, see About Writer Feature Types: User Attributes

The following table shows the attribute types that are supported.

Name

The name of the shapefile to be written.

Type

Choose one of the following field types.

Width

The width parameter controls the maximum characters that can be stored by the field. For the number type, the width parameter is the total number of characters allocated to the field, including the decimal point.

Precision

For some attribute types, controls the precision of the data and specifies the number of digits to the right of the decimal.

Index

Writing Attribute Indexes

Note: Writing attribute indexes requires that FME is running on a machine with ArcGIS installed.

The Shapefile writer can index shape data by attribute and produce attribute index files. These files are named as <featureClass>.<attributeName>.atx. FME attempts to index all attributes that are flagged as INDEX in the user attributes tab of the Shapefile Feature Type dialog.

Any attribute of type char or number that is indexed must be maximum 80 characters wide. Additionally, attribute names cannot contain characters that are illegal in Windows filenames.

If any attributes are flagged for indexing, FME automatically produces spatial index files for the feature type, regardless of the Write Spatial Index setting in the writer parameters dialog. For more information, see the writer parameter Write Spatial Index.