[fdo-internals] PostGIS provider alpha

[Jason Birch]

Hi,

We've got an alpha version of a PostGIS provider for FDO ready for some
initial testing and would really appreciate your help if you have time
to look at it.  At this point, we've been using it with PostgreSQL 8.2.x
and PostGIS 1.1.6 (bundled with PostgreSQL install) and 1.2.1
(standalone).  We have been finding and squashing bugs for a few days
now, but we're pretty sure that there are some left to ferret out.
 
You can download the current build from:
 
http://mateusz.loskot.net/tmp/fdopostgis/
 
(fdopostgis-20070426-r388.zip as of this note)
 
Getting this running is fairly straightforward.  Basically, you have to:
 
1. Have an installation of MapGuide Open Source 1.2-beta1 (or equivalent
FDO application)
2. Add the DLLs from the zipfile to the fdo directory
3. Add the <FeatureProvider> snippet included in the zipfile to your
config.xml file
4. Ensure that there is a copy of Postgresql/bin on your server
(libpq.dll and all of its dependancies), that this is in the system path
(especially for MapGuide, which runs as LocalSystem usually), and that
there are no other versions of the required dlls in the path before it.
 
Connection parameters:
 
Username and password: you guessed it...

Service: is a connection string in the format "database at host:port" where
@host and :port are optional if your database is on localhost

Datastore: is the PostgreSQL schema the data is stored under.  Typically
"public"
 
We discovered a problem in PostGIS that prevents us from accessing
anything but lowercase tables and columns.  I'm hoping that this
requirement will be fixed in the next PostGIS release.
 
If you encounter problems, the PostGIS provider maintains a logfile in
your server/bin directory called MgServer_fdopostgis.log.  Please
include this file with any error reports.  It records username/password
as part of the connection details so you may want to strip those out.
 
Once we get this provider into SVN trunk we'll be using Trac, but until
then please just reply to this email.
 
Thanks,
Jason