Spatially join point and polygon attributes in FME

Question

I'm new to FME, and most of the time I work with ArcGIS Pro. I have a few building polygons, and a few points containing additional information. Now, in ArcGIS Pro I can spatially join these two, creating one layer with the polygon "look" but added with the point information. This then needs to be exported to a new shapefile.

How can I recreate this in FME? I now used the PointOnAreaOverlayer, but when I export the area data, it still only contains the attributes from the input area, and the attributes from the points are not added. When I look at the area data with the inspector, it does show an attribute table wit the combined data, but when writing this to a new file, it does not.

Can someone help me out?

Answer 1

There are a couple of possible factors here:

1. Make sure the PointOnAreaOverlayer has the option set for Attribute Accumulation > Merge Attributes. Otherwise the attributes won't get joined onto the area features.
2. Make sure the attributes being merged are part of the writer schema. I suspect this is where the problem lies.

The simplest method for the writer schema is to open the parameters for the writer feature type (the brown object on the right), click on the User Attributes tab, then select Automatic. Then any incoming attributes will be written out. If there are some you don't need then either use an AttributeManager transformer to remove them, or switch the schema back to Manual and remove them there.

Screenshots:

PointOnAreaOverlayer

Shapefile Writer