Question

I tried to batch process a whole set of Shape files to DGN but they ended up being merged into a single DGN instead of multiple output files. Why?

Answer

The most probable reason is that your Shape files are all stored in the same folder.

Remember that each Shape (.shp) file is classed as a separate "Feature Type" (filename) within its container "Dataset" (folder).

For example c:\map1\roads.shp and c:\map1\railways.shp are two different types of feature (roads and railways) within the same dataset (map1) - so therefore your output will be a single DGN file called map1.dgn with different levels within it called roads and railways.

To get a separate destination for each .shp file you can either...

  1. Store the source files in separate folders, or...
  2. Set a Dataset Fanout by fme_basename

If you set a Dataset Fanout then really there is no point in doing a batch deploy; you may as well just select all the Shape files for the source data and run it as a regular translation.