dBASE (DBF) Writer Parameters

This optional parameter controls which character encoding is used to interpret text attributes. By default, the character encoding is automatically detected from the first feature. 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.

FME supports most encodings.

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.

• As String is the default, more widely supported version. Uses a string to represent the number. For example, 1984 is written out using the four characters 1, 9, 8, 4.
• As Binary is less compatible, but uses 32-bit integers or 64-bit floating point values. 1984 is written out as a 4-byte value not readable by Excel, qGIS, ArcGIS, etc.

DBase v3 specifies a maximum attribute limit of 255. Some programs may not be able to correctly read more than that many attributes. Setting this parameter to Yes will enforce the limit. Setting this parameter to No will ignore the limit and produce files that may not be read by other programs.