Esri Shapefile Writer Parameters

Specifies the encoding to be used when writing attribute names and attributes.

If the value is not set, the character encoding will be automatically detected from the first feature the writer receives. If the value is set, it will take precedence over the automatically detected character encoding.

The output Shapefile .dbf will contain the language driver ID for the selected or detected encoding, if no language driver ID is available for the encoding, a .cpg file may be generated instead.

FME supports most encodings.

Specifies whether or not to generate spatial index files when writing shapefiles.

• None – No spatial index is written.
• ArcGIS Compatible Spatial Index – An ArcGIS-compatible spatial index is written. ArcObjects is not required to be present on the system for this type of index to be created.
• QGIS and MapServer Spatial Index – A QGIS-compatible spatial index will be written.
• Both ArcGIS and QGIS/MapServer Compatible – Both index types will be written.

Note: If any attributes are flagged for indexing, spatial indexes are produced regardless of this setting. For more information, see User Attributes (Writing Attribute Indexes).

When selected, this option creates a single zipped .shz file that contains all the files that comprise a shapefile dataset.

For example, coast.shz will contain coast.shp, coast.dbf, coast.shx (as well as any other supporting files, if applicable).

Each .shz file corresponds to one layer (feature type).

Tip: .shz files can be renamed to ".zip" and opened with most unzip tools.

• Dimension from First Feature: Shapefiles produced will contain geometries with dimension information obtained by the first feature observed by the writer.
• 2D: Shapefiles produced will contain two-dimensional coordinate geometry.
• 2D + Measures: Shapefiles produced will contain two-dimensional coordinate geometry and measures.
• 3D + Measures: Shapefiles produced will contain three-dimensional coordinate geometry and measures.

This format does not natively support storage of a datetime type – only a date formatted as YYYYMMDD. Historically, the writer would write datetime as a char(20) to preserve any time values that might have been present, but would lose the datetime schema type.

This option allows users to write datetime attribute values as dates only if required, keeping the schema type of date but dropping any time values that may be present.

• As String (FME Datetime Format) is the default option and previous behavior. Datetime schema types will be written as char(20) to allow all variants of the FME datetime format to be written.
• Date (YYYYMMDD only) will cause the writer to preserve only the date portion of datetime, but will keep the date schema type for reading in other applications. If time is dropped from any values, a warning will be written to the log.

Note: This parameter is used only when generating an initial workspace; therefore, it is not editable in FME Workbench after the workspace has been generated.

• Multipatch: To preserve the original structure, the writer will write input 3D surfaces and solids as shape_multipatch.
• Polygon: To break 3D surfaces into polygon components, the writer will write input 3D surfaces and solids as 3D shape_polygon.

This parameter controls the handling of measures data associated with geometric data or attributes on the incoming features:

• No – Preserves the measures on the features. This is the default.
• Yes – Measures data is created from the z values on the incoming features, if the z values exist. If measures data exists, it is not overwritten by the z values on the feature.

Shapefile component files have a 2-gigabyte size limit. This parameter allows the writer to bypass this limitation.

If FME detects a file size larger than 2 GB, it splits the dataset into separate, sequentially numbered output files. (Note, however, that when reading these files, FME treats them as separate datasets.)

By default, this parameter is checked.