Re: dump shapefile

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark(dot)cave-ayland(at)ilande(dot)co(dot)uk>]

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.

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. 

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 :(


HTH,

Mark.

-- 
ILande - Open Source Consultancy
http://www.ilande.co.uk