Licensing options for this format begin with FME Desktop Professional Edition.
The Esri® ASCII Grid Reader/Writer allows FME to read and write data in the Esri ASCII Grid format.
Overview
Esri ASCII Grid files are raster files containing elevation data, and each elevation sample in the file is a point in a single FME raster feature.
Esri ASCII Grid is a very simple format. It has a very short header that precedes the raster data. This header provides the location and size of the raster to follow.
The raster is written as a series of rows, which contain one ASCII integer or floating point value per column in the raster. The first element of the raster corresponds to the upper left-hand corner of the raster.
For each raster, there is only a single feature returned, since this feature will contain the entire raster.
Note: As a text-based format, this format will usually not perform as well as binary raster formats (for example, GeoTIFF) for reading and writing. If performance is important, consider using another format.
Reader Overview
FME considers a single Esri ASCII Grid file to be a dataset.
Writer Overview
The Esri ASCII Grid writer creates and writes data into a single folder specified by the Dataset parameter.
FME Raster Features
FME raster features represent raster data and use several concepts that are unlike those used in the handling of vector data. The topics below describe how FME processes raster data.
Esri ASCII Grid only supports rasters with a single numeric band.