dBASE (DBF) Reader Parameters

Controls which character encoding is used to interpret text attributes from the DBF file.

By default, the character encoding will be automatically detected from the source DBF file (fme-source-encoding). 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.

Controls whether the reader trims preceding spaces of attribute values.

• Yes – Preceding spaces in attribute values are discarded.
• No – Preceding spaces are left intact.

dBASE marks records as deleted by setting the first byte as an asterisk (*). This option allows users to control whether the reader reads elements flagged as deleted. The reader skips over deleted rows by default.

• Yes – Deleted elements are read.
• No – Deleted elements are skipped.

dBASE store attributes in a text-based manner, so numeric attributes are converted to text before being written to disk. This parameter controls how FME reads these numeric types and influences how they will be written at the end of a transformation.

• Standard Types is the default, and this option will cause the reader to convert the text representation of numeric attributes to a binary one, choosing a size that will safely contain all possible values of the fixed-width field. This can be useful when converting from dBASE to a format that supports binary storage of numbers. This is an adequate option in cases where fixed-length numbers are not a concern. Selecting this option will cause FME to produce short and long types for numeric attributes with no decimal places, and float or double types for numeric attributes with decimals.
• Explicit Width and Precision will keep the attributes as fixed-length, text-based fields. This option is preferred when performing a dBASE-to-dBASE translation, as the field widths will remain the same on write. Selecting this option will cause FME to produce the same number(width, precision) types as the underlying dBASE file contains, which will ensure that writing to other fixed-width format types will not cause attribute sizes to increase during a translation.

Additional Attributes to Expose

Use this parameter to expose Format Attributes in FME Workbench when you create a workspace:

• In a dynamic scenario, it means these attributes can be passed to the output dataset at runtime.
• In a non-dynamic scenario, this parameter allows you to expose additional attributes on multiple feature types. Click the browse button to view the available format attributes (which are different for each format) for the reader.