[GRASS-dev] table only creation in v.in.ascii

[Moritz Lennert]

On 10/01/08 22:16, Hamish wrote:
> Martin Landa wrote:
>>> following our discussion two days ago, I have started patching
>>> v.in.ascii to support creating only an attribute table w/o
>>> any vector objects/geometries.
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am still away so not really follwing the lists right now, but
> checking in spotted this thread.
> 
> v.in.ascii is the wrong module for this functionality, it should be in
> db.in.ascii or so (but the two sharing code would be nice). ISTR Markus
> had created a module like that a few months ago. Was it v.in.ogr with a
> DB driver?? I can't quite remember now, just that it exists and is on
> my TODO list to investigate if the v.in.garmin & v.in.gpsbabel scripts
> should use it.

db.in.ogr

The problem with the ogr csv driver is that it doesn't do any guessing 
of column types.

I agree that ideally we should have db.in.ascii or a patched ogr csv 
driver. However the former would mean an extensive amount of code shared 
between v.in.ascii and db.in.ascii, making it questionable whether these 
should really be two different modules, and the latter means going into 
C++ and getting familiar with ogr which might not be an option for those 
(the one) interested in doing the coding...

But if the code sharing is not deemed a problem, it should be fairly 
straightforward to create a db.in.ascii from Benjamin's code. And if 
someone is willing to patch ogr this would probably be the ideal solution.

Moritz