Raster versus Vector Features

FME Features with raster geometry cannot be processed in all the ways that vector features can. If an operation that is not yet supported for a raster is attempted, a vector FME polygon feature is used instead. This substitute feature represents the original raster bounding box, and contains the original attributes.

Raster-to-vector data translation and vector-to-raster data translation is not an automatic process. There are factories through which vector data can be transformed into raster data, and raster data into vector points. There currently do not exist any means of stroking or transforming raster data into non-trivial vector output through FME.

FME features with raster geometry each typically represent one raster data file. Raster writers typically accept a folder as a destination dataset. When writing multiple raster files for one dataset folder, the feature type name is used to determine the filename. If multiple features are written to the same dataset, the name will be suffixed to be unique. Some writers use feature type fanout by default on the fme_basename attribute on each feature, thus providing a name with respect to the source data and having some degree of uniqueness.