Tutorial: Triggering Notifications from a Workspace

Introduction

The FME Server Notification Service allows messages to be sent and received by FME Server when events occur. There are several supported protocols, which enable FME Server to communicate with a variety of applications.

The architecture, illustrated in the diagram below, is based on topics, which are channels for messages. Publishers create messages, while subscribers consume them. For example, a workspace sends a message to a topic when a CAD file fails validation. If an email subscriber is set up to receive this message, it will respond by sending an email to a specified address.

For more information on the notification service, please see the Notification Service documentation

Testing notifications

In order to see that notifications are actually being sent, you can use the Topic Monitoring on the Notifications page in FME Server:

You can also configure a subscription, such as an email subscription. Please see Sending Email, Part 1 for information on how to do this. Note that the tutorial uses the FME Store transformer, FMEServerEmailGenerator, as a shortcut to generate the JSON. It is faster to use, but cannot be configured to create a different type of notification.

In this tutorial, we will be creating notifications for use with the email subscriber, but the techniques are essentially the same for other subscribers.