[mapserver-users] Re: help w/ ogr/tiles

[Daniel Morissette]

Drew wrote:
> 
> thanks for the reply, which now gives more questions (but im narrowing
> it down ;)
> 
> is there something that can open .dgn files to find the extents?
> 

I added a report of extent in the "ogrinfo" tool a few minutes ago.  So
if you get the latest OGR CVS source and recompile ogrinfo then you'll
be able to use it to get the extent of any supported format... and for
the benefit of other MapServer users: that includes shapefiles, so
ogrinfo can also be used to find out extents of any shapefile.

See the OGR-HOWTO for more details on how to use ogrinfo:
  http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc/ogr-howto.html#ogrinfo

> and... how *do* i setup tiles then? manually isn't really an option as
> there are hundreds.
> 

The only other option if you want to stick to DGN is to setup one layer
for each file... but with hundreds that's not a very interesting option.

> will i have to convert to dxf and then to shp? if i do that, will
> anything be lost in the conversion, or will the tiling then work fine?
> 

You could use the OGR2OGR tool to setup a script to convert all your
shapefiles from DGN to SHAPEFILE directly... there shouldn't be any loss
of information between DGN and SHP AFAIK.  
There's an example of use of OGR2OGR on the OGR mailing list at:
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sfcom-dev/message/107

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.