[mapserver-dev] MS RFC 37: AUTO Projection Support

[Howard Butler]

On Feb 22, 2010, at 1:52 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>> Is there a plan to make this work with shapefile that have .prj file outside of adding a gdal/ogr dependency?
>> While a love gdal/ogr, it is heavy in terms a package dependencies, (unless something has changed), and often a struggle to add to production sites that are not doing imagery.
>> This should be noted as appropriate. Since it is an opt-in feature I'm good either way.
> 
> Steve,
> 
> It would not be possible (well, not practical anyways) to support
> shapefile .prj files without access to the GDAL/OGR OGRSpatialReference
> object to translate them.  

I think PROJECTION AUTO should be currently intended to only be available when GDAL support is enabled.  I see PROJECTION AUTO as a newbie-friendly feature, and from a practical standpoint almost all newbie-accessible MapServer builds have GDAL available to them.  


> But if GDAL is available, we could use the fast
> shapefile support in mapserver, and GDAL to translate the SRS.
> 
> I'm not sure whether Howard was planning to do this or not.


I was going to implement the method to fetch the .prj file in the shapefile driver and then hand off to the ESRI WKT translation function to make a projectionObj.  I wasn't going to alter the shapefile driver to use OGR, etc.


Howard