Known Issue: VertexCreator creates lines instead of points

Symptom

In FME 2021.0, when inputting point geometry into the VertexCreator with the Mode set to ‘Add Point’, the output contains line features instead of points even if the point is identical to the last vertex on the feature.  

It may not be immediately obvious that these are lines because the Graphics View in the Visual Preview is blank.  The Feature Information for the records indicates that the geometry type is fme_line.
 

If writing to a point feature class in a File Geodatabase, an error in the job log will state that FME "Cannot write a non-point feature to a point feature class".  The error message will vary for different output formats.

Cause

CSV and Excel readers automatically generate point geometries if latitude and longitude or X and Y attributes are detected.  This is intentional behaviour used with CSV and Excel readers. You can verify if FME recognized the attributes if a) the reader output feature cache displays points in the Graphics View, and b) the reader's User Attributes have assigned the x_coordinate and y_coordinate types to the latitude and longitude attributes.

Now in FME 2021.0, when the point geometries are generated from the reader and the same attributes are processed in a VertexCreator using Add Point mode, FME will add a second point on the same lat/long location.  Add Point mode is intentionally designed to generate a line feature when adding a second point to an existing point.  When a line has two vertices at the same coordinates, it has no length and is blank on the Graphics View.

Resolution

This issue has been resolved in FME 2021.2 and newer builds.

In FME 2021.2+, the default Mode is changed to ‘Replace with Point’ and an additional ‘Ignore Duplicated Coordinates’ parameter is available when the mode is set to ‘Add Point’.  

For best practices:

• In FME 2020.0+, if you want to create point geometries from CSV and Excel datasets, you do not need to use a VertexCreator since FME will automatically generate the points.
• In FME 2021.0, if you wish to continue using the VertexCreator to create a point, change the Mode parameter to Replace With Point.