Creating a new hyperlink field in FME

Question

I have a table similar to the following attached to geometry destined for inclusion in an esri geodatabase:

What I am trying to do in FME, is create a new field containing a hyperlink to reference the file name and location of the reference number at a fixed networked location. For example:

Is this possible in FME and if so, what would be the best way to go about it? There are occasions where multiple concatenated reference fields exist, so I wonder if it's possible to also concatenate the hyperlinks or if they would be required to be split into separate fields?

Answer 1

You can certainly build URLs in FME. I would use the AttributeCreator or AttributeManager transformers. Within the transformer, you can build the hyperlink in the text editor.

In order to enable these hyperlinks in ArcGIS, you will need to enable them in the Layer, not the feature class. See this page on using hyperlinks.

As for multiple hyperlinks, while it is definitely possible for FME to create two URLs in a single field, they won't work in ArcGIS. Your best option is to create multiple attributes (hopefully no more than two). However, your ArcGIS layer can only specify one hyperlink. I suppose you could specify another hyperlink field in a different layer, but it could become confusing.

Hope this helps.