Introduction
When working with FME, encountering unexpected behaviors or limitations can be frustrating. To help navigate these challenges, this article provides a comprehensive list of known issues affecting all retired versions of FME. For a list of issues in supported versions of FME, see Known Issues in FME.
Each issue includes details on its impact, available workarounds, and whether a fix has been implemented. Our goal is to ensure transparency and provide solutions wherever possible, so you can keep your workflows running smoothly.
This article will not be maintained as these issues are no longer in supported versions of FME.
Known Issues in FME 2020.x and Older
For a list of issues for current versions of FME, see Known Issues in FME.
| Feature | Product | Description | Workaround | Affects | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Installation | FME Desktop | As of FME 2020 and newer, the SQL Server Native Client 2012 will no longer be included in the installation. As such you may encounter issues with connecting to an Enterprise (SDE) Geodatabase. | If you are unable to connect to an SDE Geodatabase after upgrading to FME 2020.X, or newer, please install the SQL Server ODBC client. For more information about supported SQL Server clients for ArcGIS, please see the following page: https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/system-requirements/latest/database-requirements-sqlserver.htm |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| Installation | FME Desktop | If attempting to connect to SQL Server on a new system with no previous install of FME Desktop 2020.0, you may encounter a missing driver error. | If you are unable to connect to a SQL Server database, install the MSOLEDBSQL driver that is present in the FME Desktop installer. Searching in your FME install directory for 'MSOLEDBSQL' should bring up the installer. If you run that installer, and re-launch FME Workbench it should connect to SQL Server as expected. |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| Database Connections | FME Desktop | As of FME 2020.x, certain JDBC Database formats were split from their original format family, and as a result, no longer share database connection details between Non-JDBC and JDBC database formats. When opening workspaces created in an older version of FME with these types of database connections you’ll notice a message in the Format dropdown “Microsoft SQL Server Non-Spatial (JDBC) (replaced by MSSQL_JDBC_NONSPATIAL_2)”. This will indicate the need to recreate the Database Connection in most cases. |
As such, database connections created in pre-2020.x FME builds will have to be remade for the specific Database format. Eg: A database connection created in 2019 for SQL Server, could be used for both the JDBC and non-JDBC SQL Server format. In 2020.x, you will have to make a new JDBC database connection to use it with SQL Server. |
2020.x |
Unplanned |
| Web Connections | FME Server | After upgrading your FME Server to 2020.0 or newer, when users run workspaces that contain any web or database connections the translation will fail with the error “Unauthorized request by user due to lack of proper permissions”. | We made some security improvements regarding Web or Database connections for FME Server 2020. Therefore, after upgrading you will be required to reconfigure the necessary permissions. Please see this article for more information. |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| Engines | FME Server | After install, FME Server continually tries to launch two engines, however I am only licensed for a single engine. This results in errors reported in the fmeserver.log and subsequently System Events. However when I try and change the engine count to one, it always reverts back to two. | Drop the engine count from 2 to 0 first and then change the count back up to 1 and this change should now be applied successfully. |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| SMEServerNotifier | FME Server | If the FMEServerNotifier transformer is used in FME Desktop 2019 to notify an FME Server 2020 topic it will not work. This is because the FME Server REST API V1 was deprecated in 2020 and the FMEServerNotifier used V1 in 2019. | If you use FME Desktop 2020 to notify an FME Server 2020 topic it will work. |
2020.x |
Deprecated |
| FME Server Web UI | FME Server | When trying to view a file stored in a network-based resource in the FME Server web UI it returns 'Path <sharedresource>/<filename>.ext is not a valid path'. | Edit the shared resource to include a trailing slash at the end of the file path. |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| FME Server | If an IMAP email server is only enabled to use TLS1.2, then FME Server will not be able to connect to it. | To fix this modify the FMEProcessMonitorCore file: 1. Find your processMonitorConfigCore.txt file (it should be in your install directory which is by default located C:\apps\FMEServer\Server or C:\Program Files\FMEServer\Server) 2. Create a backup of this file (it's good to have if we want to revert this). 3. Open it as an admin and find # Start FME Server Publisher Plugin (imap) then insert -Dmail.imap.ssl.protocols=TLSv1.2 -Dmail.imaps.ssl.protocols=TLSv1.2 after -Dmail.imaps.fetchsize=1048576 |
2020.x |
Workaround |
|
| User Parameters | FME Server | On FME Desktop, we create a relative path to find data if the data is located in the same folder as the workspace or a subfolder of the workspace. Once the workspace is uploaded to FME Server, sometimes these relative paths are not removed. One way to check if this issue is affecting you is to open up your workspace in a text editor and see if you can find the parameter value FME_MF_DIR_ENCODED. | 1. Save your workspace in a new location 2. Update your readers to ensure that the relative path is removed. Save the workspace again. 3. Upload the workspace to FME Server. |
2020.x |
Workaround |
| FME Server Apps | FME Server | When an SVG image is uploaded into a Workspace or Gallery App it looks ok on the edit page, but once the App is created the image does not load. | Use a PNG or JPG image instead. |
2020.x |
Unplanned |
| FeatureReader Transformer | FME Desktop | Reading features fails when using the FeatureReader if feature type names contain spaces. Reading is successful using a regular reader for the same feature type. | Use the regular reader or upgrade to the latest release of FME 2020. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.0.0.1 |
| GML Reader | FME Desktop | GML reader generates the message "xml-geometry-ref Geometry Builder: unable to adopt the below geometry because construction for its own geometry has already been finalized". This is most likely because it contains xlink_href="". We added support to xlinked, referenced geometry in 2019.1. Previous versions of FME ignored this. | Use GML reader's ignore schema mode, or upgrade to the latest release or beta of FME |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1 |
| FME Hub | FME Desktop | Issue affects non-offical packaged formats. For example, in Workbench try to add a reader of type "Japanese Fundamental Geospatial Data". You can find it in the formats list, but when you select it, the formats field doesn't accept it. | No workaround. Upgrade to 2020.0.2.1 b20238 |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.0.2.1 |
| FME Workbench | FME Desktop | When accessing Tools>FME Options, FME may become unresponsive and crash. This is a result of an identified issue with FME Desktop 2020.1 (builds 20594, 20596, 20608) and ArcGIS Pro 2.6 | There are a few ways to workaround this issue: Use FME 2020.1 32-bit with ArcGIS Desktop 10.8.1, OR Use FME 2020.0 with ArcGIS Pro 2.6, OR Use FME 2020.1 64-bit with ArcGIS Pro 2.5 |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1.2 |
| FME Workbench | FME Desktop | The correct feature count appears on the Reader feature types with spaces in name but no feature cache will appear in any downstream transformers when using Partial Runs. When this behavior occurs in a workspace where some Reader feature types contain spaces and some do not, features may appear to 'disappear' within the workflow. This behavior affects FME 2020.1 (builds 20591, 20596, all platforms). |
There are a few ways to workaround this issue: Disable Feature Caching Purge feature caches from Reader feature types and perform Partial Runs from a downstream transformer |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1 |
| Environment Variables | FME Desktop | Using FME 2020.1.x and FME_TEMP environment variable set to a root volume (eg. D:\ ), FME Workbench, Data Inspector or Licensing Assistant, will crash when starting up. In the Windows Event Viewer, an application error is logged with the faulting module name: fmeutil.dll |
Please make a top-level directory on the drive (e.g. D:\FMETEMP) and set FME_TEMP to this directory. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.2 |
| Licensing | FME Desktop | Using FME 2020.1 (builds 20594 to 20624) and connecting to a floating license, the FME Licensing Assistant reports "This application cannot be used with the current license". This is error is due to the presence of an expired temporary license. An example of the dialogue you may see: | To resolve this issue, you can remove the temporary license by finding the *.fmelic file in one of the following directories: C:\ProgramData\Safe Software\FME\Licenses <fme-install-folder>/licenses C:\users\<user>\Documents\FME\Licenses You can open the *.fmelic file in a text editor to see if it has an expiry date and then delete the file. You should be able to continue using your floating license. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1.3 |
| ArcGIS Online/Portal Writer | FME Desktop | In FME Desktop 2020.2.x, when creating a new ArcGIS Online/Portal writer, you can not select an existing feature service within a shared group. For an existing feature service writer shared with a group, you may encounter an error as well. | Use the ID to select the layer Open the feature service that you want to add in a web browser, in the web URL, there is an "id=" Copy the value to the "Feature Service" parameter for the ArcGIS Online writer inside brackets e.g. (64d00a7c2ed14b0f9da3857d83bd40aa) |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2021.0 |
| Google KMZ Writer | FME Desktop | Using FME Desktop 2020.2.x writing out with Fanout Dataset Fanout Expression with the .kmz file extension resulted in an error and no data being written out. Files with “.” at beginning of the filename. | Do not set kml_document attribute on output features. Or do not use “.” in filenames instead use “_” |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.2 |
| Publishing | FME Server | When publishing a workspace to FME Server via FME Desktop, if the FME Server username contains international characters or the password contains international characters such as 本å ä ö à, FME Workbench will give an authentication error. | Create an FME Server username and password without these characters, or use a different account to publish. Logging into FME Server is unaffected. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2021.0 |
| Installation | FME Server | In the FME Server Web UI when I try and view Resources or Broadcast Messages it says “We could not find what you wanted”. In Automations I cannot set the protocol type for triggers or external actions. | You can either upgrade to 2020.0.0.1 or you will need to update a web application config file to correctly reference the database URL. For more information and full instructions on how to do this please see this article: https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/109765/known-issue-fme-server-resourcesautomations-could.html. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.0.0.1 |
| Automations | FME Server | When building an Automations you see 'No Connections Available' while configuring a workspace that contains a database parameter. If you configure the job via the Run Workspace page the connection appears. | Instead of using the default user parameter, create a text user parameter and link it database parameter. Step by step instructions on this can be found here. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1 |
| Publishing | FME Server | When attempting to re-publish a workspace to FME Server (e.g. a workspace that is already uploaded to FME Server - not just via the re-publish button) if the workspace is registered to the Notification Service and the 'Parameter to Get Topic Message' is set the workspace will fail. Reason was: The following readers or writers are included in an enabled service, but are not present in the workspace: <FORMAT_PARAM> | Delete the workspace from FME Server, and then publish it again. Alternatively, change workflows to no longer use the Notification Service. See the best answer on this Community post for details on how this could be done. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1.3 |
| FME Server Apps | FME Server | In FME Server 2020.2 when I view my Gallery App there are no browser icons shown. | No workaround. Upgrade to 2020.2.1 |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.2.1 |
| Custom Transformers | FME Server | Workspaces with linked custom transformers will fail if the custom transformer is in the repository or workspace folder. | To fix this issue you can upgrade your FME Server or follow one of the workarounds listed in this article. |
2020.1 2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.2 |
| Proxy | FME Server | In FME Server 2020.1.1, if you have enabled a proxy in the UI and set up exceptions for the FME Server, FME Server will respect them, unless there is a Python in the workspace. | If you open fmeServerConfig.txt. Under the heading FME SERVER SETTINGS START, add the following line: ENABLE_ENGINEPROXY=false |
2020.1.x 2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.1.3.2 |
| Merged Feature Types | FME Server | After publishing a workspace to FME Server that contains a merged feature type reader it is not possible to run the workspace via the Run Workspace page or Automations. | Either upgrade or see this article for a workaround. |
2020.0 |
Resolved 2020.2 |
| Emailer Transformer | FME Desktop | When using the Emailer in FME Desktop, if the SMTP authentication email password contains international characters such as äåø, the workspace will fail with the error: 2020-10-23 15:52:48| 1.3| 0.1|WARN |Emailer: <class 'UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128). This is caused by an unresolved bug in the Python 3 standard library. For more information on this bug see https://bugs.python.org/issue29750https://bugs.python.org/issue29750. This issue was not present in FME 2018 or older because these versions used the Python 2.7 library which has looser text encoding practices. |
To resolve this issue, please change your email password to remove these characters. If you are unable to change your password, please downgrade to FME 2018 or older to use Python 2.7. |
2019.x |
Workaround |
| Installation | FME Desktop | macOS Catalina may identify downloaded installers as a risk, and prevent opening via double-click | There are several ways to get around this! #1 Instead of double-clicking the FME Desktop Installer icon, right click and select "Open". This will present a slightly different dialog which presents a warning, but allows the user to select "Open" anyway and continue with installation after providing password credentials. #2 Go to Settings / Security & Privacy after receiving the error message, and under General / Allow Apps Downloaded From .. select "Open Anyway" next to "FME Desktop Installer" #3 Optionally, you can also get around this from the command line by removing the quarantine Extended Attribute on the file: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file |
2019.x |
Resolved 2020.0 |
| FME Workbench | FME Desktop | Some users may experience application crashes with combinations of older Windows operating systems (specifically Windows 7) and third party applications such as Photoshop and Civil3D after installation of FME 2019.x. | Upgrade to FME 2019.1.3+. Note prior versions of FME (2018.x) do not exhibit this behaviour either. |
2019.1 2019.0 |
Resolved 2019.2 |
| File Geodatabase Writer | FME Desktop | FME 64-bit fails to write to Geodatabase (File and SDE) with ArcGIS Pro 2.4 and 2.5. The following is an error message you may encounter: An error occurred while attempting to insert a row into the table '<tablename>' using a cursor. The error number from ArcObjects is: '-2147418113' The error message from ArcObjects is: {} An error occurred while attempting to insert a row into the table '<tablename>' using a cursor. |
There are a couple of workarounds to resolve this with FME 2019 64-bit: 1. Use ArcGIS Desktop with 64-bit Background Geoprocessing OR 2. To continue using FME with ArcPro, switch the Python Compatibility to “Esri ArcGIS Pro 2.1 to 2.5 Python(3.6)”. For FME 2019.x and higher, iIf you have no user defined Python (start-up/shutdown scripts or Python Caller) in your workspace, then please add a small startup Python script. To do this go to Navigator > Workspace Parameters > Scripting > Startup Python and add one line: print() The option is required as an additional step due to our effort to reduce the workspaces with “Python 2.7” since Python 2.7 is deprecated |
2019.x |
Resolved 2020.0 |
| File Geodatabase Writer | FME Desktop | When creating a File Geodatabase using the latest Esri ArcPro release (2.4/2.5 beta), and writing to it via FME's Esri Geodatabase (File Geodatabase API) format, an error will occur. The error message may look like: ERROR |Geodatabase Error (-2147219115): The row contains a bad value. ERROR |FileGDB Writer: Could not create feature class 'TestPolygon' ERROR |A fatal error has occurred. Check the logfile above for details WARN |Geodatabase Error (-2147418113): Unexpected operation. WARN |FileGDB Writer: Could not disable Load Only Mode for feature type 'TestPolygon' |
Use a File Geodatabase created in ArcGIS Desktop or use the Esri File Geodatabase (FGDB) writer. |
2019.x |
Resolved 2020.0 |
| GeoJSON Writer | FME Desktop | GeoJSON writer produces an invalid GeoJSON root structure if writing more than one feature type. The GeoJSON writer currently wraps the JSON feature collections with an array when multiple feature types are output. The GeoJSON standard mandates a FeatureCollection object as the root so this is incorrect (it is valid JSON but not valid GeoJSON). | Write one feature type per GeoJSON output document. This can be done using one writer per feature type or dataset fanout on feature type name. In this case the root object is a FeatureCollection and our output is valid. |
2018.0 2017.x |
Resolved 2018.1 |
| Database Connections | FME Desktop | A user may encounter an error inconsistently while retrieving database or web connections either via FME Options or within a Reader/Writer: Error message: "Error retrieving connections" Java Virtual Machine (JVM) memory issues on 32-bit Windows may prevent addition of certain readers/writers, or the correct application of web or database connections in FME 2018.0 Desktop x86. |
64-bit FME 2018.0 does not exhibit this issue. Unless you require 32-bit FME for format support, we recommend using the 64-bit installer. If you do require 32-bit formats, setting the following FME environment variables should resolve the issue in 2018.0: SET FME_JVM_MAX_HEAP_SIZE=128M SET FME_JVM_MIN_HEAP_SIZE=128M If you are still experiencing intermittent connection issues, try altering the heap size: Go to the Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables: Create 2 NEW SYSTEM Environment variables FME_JVM_MAX_HEAP_SIZE=64M FME_JVM_MIN_HEAP_SIZE=64M If 64M doesn't work, try: 32M, 64M, 96M, 96M, 150M, 256M, 512M. |
2018.x |
Resolved 2019.0 |
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