Re: dump shapefile

Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 13:00 +0000, Dave Page wrote:
>
>> I'm interested in supporting it, but if we're going to do it, we should
>> do it properly. If there really is nothing needed but to allow dumping
>> of shapes, then thats fine, but it doesn't seem like it would be all
>> (and I don't know PostGIS so can't really make an informed comment).
>>
>> Mark; can you comment on what would be needed in pgAdmin to claim we
>> support PostGIS?
>
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> In terms of operation, PostGIS is 95% server-side code, with the only
> client-side code being the shp2pgsql/pgsql2shp loaders which are used to
> convert from shapefiles to PostGIS and vice-versa. pgsql2shp connects to
> a database and writes a shapefile to local disk, whereas shp2pgsql
> outputs a series of INSERTs to stdout which can be piped through psql
> for insertion.

Oh, in that case then it does sound like what Willy-Bas is asking for
would be all we need :-)

Willy-Bas; are you able to look at this? I'm not sure if any of the
regular developers would be interested or have time (I fall firmly into
the latter category right now).

> The hardest part is likely to be how to ensure that pgAdmin ships with
> the latest versions of these executables if this is the way you decide
> to go; they do tend to get subtly tweaked between releases to iron out
> corner cases.

I would probably not ship them (there would be licencing issues there
anyway), but just add a config option so the user can select the version
they want

> In general, I think the biggest complaint regarding pgAdmin on the
> mailing lists relates to the fact that the display control won't display
> results with really long lines (geometries representing country outlines
> can be fairly big), although I'm not sure whether there is anything much
> that can be done about this :(

No, not really - it's a limitation of the wxWidgets/OS controls. I've
had complaints like that in the past and found it was because people
were trying to display a table full of 6MB shapes! Even one or two of
those is more than the grid will ever handle well for fairly obvious
reasons I think.

Thanks Mark!

/D