Hi all<br><br>This is rather a long question but...<br><br>
<p class="MsoNormal">Today I ran into an issue with ArcSDE which luckily for me
the latest MS4W resolved (thanks to everyone's efforts in keeping things
current) which leads me onto a question.<span style="">
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Our solution also uses the OGR tools and specifically
ogrinfo to find out field names from ESRI shape files or MapInfo Tab
files.<span style=""> </span>We have been quite fortunate in that
we have been able to use the compiled binaries from FWTools (and another thanks
to Frank for these!).<span style=""> </span>Unfortunately this
method won't work for ArcSDE as FWTools doesn't support ArcSDE.<span style=""> </span>It got me thinking to how MapServer now works
with the libmap.dll's for different input formats. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As I don't have client libraries for ArcSDE (but our clients
do on their networks) it may prove difficult to rebuild ogrinfo or even
MapServer if say I wanted to have a higher MAX_SYMBOLS than the default with
SDE support.<br style="">
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My question is this:<span style=""> </span>when
compiling with ArcSDE support there is a need for the c header files or similar
from ArcSDE. Is there a need for the actual DLL's? If there is
couldn't an open source dummy set of DLL's with all the external c functions setup
be built?<span style=""> </span>This could potentially allow for
people to have their custom compiles work and also have a custom version that has
been compiled for ArcSDE.<span style=""> </span>Obviously if
anyone wanted to query ArcSDE in their development environment they would need
real DLL's.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Basically it would be great if one could do things how the
MS4W works at present.<span style=""> </span>I think it is
great that you can pop a different libmap.dll (and other supporting dll's) into
the cgi directory and hey presto you have extra data format support. <br></p><p class="MsoNormal">I guess there could be potential copyright issues in doing this but it was just a thought...</p>Cheers<p class="MsoNormal">
Mike<br></p>