[gdal-dev] DBF handling

[Even Rouault]

Selon Luca Sigfrido Percich <sigfrido at tiscali.it>:

> Uffe,
>
> I have had a similar problems with TeleAtlas shapefiles with IDs stored
> as long Numeric fields.
>
> I resorted to the ogr2ogr -fieldTypeToString option [1] to tell ogr to
> convert to string all the mumeric fields, which is still an imperfect
> workaround but at least will keep you from manually changing the DBF
> files. Unfortunately the conversion is applied to all the field of the
> specified type.

Luca,

I doubt very much that this works. -fieldTypeToString is a post processing
option. In the case reported by Uffe, the data loss occurs in the shapefile
driver itself. -fieldTypeToString occurs too late here. -fieldTypeToString is
mostly usefull in situations where "odd" data types (such as datetime,
string/integer/real lists) aren't handled by the output driver.