[gdal-dev] ArcObjects OGR driver binaries - reads FileGDB with ArcView license

[Ragi Y. Burhum]

Some of you have e-mailed me directly asking for windows binaries of this
arcobjects driver so I decided to e-mail the mailing list in case other
people were also interested.

You can download them from http://bit.ly/clDrmd

Some questions that I was asked:

1.- What are the requirements?

- An ArcView license (the cheapest of the ESRI licenses) - I know, most
people here won't have it.
- The ESRI libraries installed. This typically happens if you have ArcEngine
or ArcGIS Desktop or Server installed.


2.- So what can you do with this?


A) Connect to many of the ESRI Datasources (using the same code ESRI uses to
connect):

 a) FileGDB
 b) Enterprise Geodatabase (aka ArcSDE) - note this regularly requires
ArcEditor - but this driver manages a connection with only ArcView.
 c) AccessDB. Wow, big deal, we were able to do that before hand :)


B) Read Feature Classes (write not implemented).

   These include 'Normal' Feature Classes, Annotation Classes, Dimension
Classes, Representation Classes, Network Features, etc etc

3.- Why would I use this connect to Enterprise Geodatabase or AccessDB
instead of the other OGR equivalent drivers (namely ESRI ArcSDE or ESRI
Personal GeoDatabase)?

It's your choice. If you have an ESRI ArcView license, you can use these.
The advantage is that this driver will allow you to open some of the ESRI
Complex FeatureClasses
since it is going through ESRI's data access layer. The disadvantage is that
it is going through ESRI's data access layer ;-)

4.- Why did you write this?

- I wanted to load data in one shot into a PostGIS and one of my customers
did not have an ArcEditor nor ArcGIS Server license. The FileGDBs we were
using were 100GB+ in size and I was tired of trying to do magic to manage
the 60+shapefiles exported everytime to then call another command to load
them into PostGIS.
Keeping track of which features were failing was a pain since I had to
preserve IDs across my exports. Now I can do it all with one shot.

5.- How do you use it?

Prefix the Datasource with "AO:"

Example:

- Read from FileGDB and load into PostGIS

ogr2ogr -overwrite -skipfailures -f "PostgreSQL" PG:"host=myhost
user=myuser dbname=mydb password=mypass" AO:"C:\somefolder\BigFileGDB.gdb"
"MyFeatureClass"


- Get detailed info of Personal GeoDatabase:


ogrinfo -al AO:"C:\somefolder\PersonalGDB.mdb"


- Get detailed info of Enterprise GeoDatabase (.sde contains target version
to connect to):


ogrinfo -al AO:"C:\somefolder\MySDEConnection.sde"


6.- What about *nix?


This code should compile using the ArcEngine Unix SDK, I just did not have
access to it to test this.


7.- Questions/Known issues?


- Date and blob fields have not been implemented. It is probably just a few
lines of code, I just have not had time to do it.

- This version is a little bit more up to date than the patch that was
submitted to GDAL. Once that patch gets committed, I'll submit the couple of
bug fixes this binary has.

- This version is alpha, so pardon any obvious mistakes :)


If there are any issues, submit them to the GDAL Trac and contact me.



Best wishes,


- Ragi Burhum
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