[gdal-dev] Calculate footprints of shapefiles
Armin Burger
armin.burger at gmx.net
Tue Mar 15 20:08:48 EDT 2011
Hi all
I would like to catalogue shapefiles scattered over lots of directories
of the file system and store retrievable information of the shapefiles
in a PostGIS layer. Extracting parameters like extent, projection,
fields, etc works very fine with GDAL's Python bindings.
But I would also like to store a sort of "footprint" of the whole
shapefile as a geometry object since the extent is a bit coarse
geographic representation of the shapefile.
So far I have no better idea than eg. for polygon shapefiles looping
through all features, applying a Union function on them. And at the end
trying to use the Simplify method on the resulting polygon that will be
used as the footprint.
This is for sure not very efficient for larger shapefiles with lots of
records. And for line and point shapefiles I still don't have a clue how
their records could be represented by an enclosing polygon (maybe the
Boundary functions does something like this...).
Any ideas how this footprint generation could be achieved in a feasible
way using GDAL/OGR Python?
Cheers, Armin
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