[mapserver-users] Re: [GRASSLIST:1961] SHP files Q.

[Radim Blazek]

Ben-Nes Michael wrote:
> Hi
>
> At last I was able to create ESRI shape map in grass :)
>
> The problem was I wasn't been able to find how to work against the DBF file
> that used as a attributes DBASE for the SHAPE file.

Do you need to update records in dbf by values read from grass? Can you 
specify better?

> Is there a way in grass to interact with DBF file ?

In theory there are two ways in practice there is no one without some 
additional effort.
1. You can use odbc driver and v.to.db for updating tables by values from     
    vector. Problem is that dbf driver for unixODBC is not freely available.
    There are some commercial drivers I think. Or ODBC-ODBC bridge which can
     be established between unix and windows machine. On windows dbf driver
     for odbc is part of M$Office? But my last experience is that M$ dbf      
     driver may not be used for updating, only for reading. That is probably  
     last M$ improvement.
2. Dbf driver for grass (very simple, and not tested well) is written in
    grass51. However driver may be compiled in grass 5.0, it lacks some
    functionality of real RDBMSes which are called by grass5 db.* modules
    (DISTINCT, ORDER BY, COUNT(*)).
    In fact I found dbf driver very usefull and modified some db.* modules
    in grass5 and I am using dbf driver here. However it was very quick
    solution which I cannot commit to repository and I don't have time for
    code cleaning.

Radim

> I think that grass should embrace mapserver as the front end solution for
> web pages.
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