Cannot Reproject NAD27 - NAD83 on FME Server

Symptom

You have a worskpace that does a coordinate system transformation or reprojection where there is a datum transformation between NAD27 and NAD83. This workspace succeeds when run in FME Workbench on FME Desktop but fails when run on FME Server. The error in the log file may look something like this:

 Reproject: Could not reproject the geometry of the preceeding feature: Reprojector: Could not create reprojection engine

Cause

This problem occurs because FME needs to know whether the data is in Canada or the US. The grid shift files used in Canada for the NTv2 transformation and in the US for the NADCON transformation have overlapping bounding boxes so that without this setting FME may choose the wrong one. If the setting is not configured, FME will fail rather than risk using the wrong transformation.

In FME Workbench, you are prompted for this setting during installation and you can access this setting from the menu Tools > FME Options > Coordinate Systems. FME Server has no default for this setting and therefore the transformation cannot be done until the setting is made.

Resolution

On your FME Server machine, you need to set FME to do either NAD84 <-> NAD27 transformations in Canada or the USA.

To configure this, follow the instructions in the FME Server Admin Guide here: Configuring Implicit NAD27 to NAD83 Datum Shifts

Then restart FME Server and run the workspace again to see if it completes successfully.