[mapserver-users] strange mapinfo layer

[Daniel Morissette]

Alex Rice wrote:
> 
> Daniel, thanks a lot. I see how it's working now. I am pretty new
> at GIS stuff. Here is a related question. I have another TAB file
> which has no geometry info in it, and crashes mapserver when I
> use it as an OGR connection. 

Hummm... this is bad... even though a layer with no geometries is
useless to MapServer, it should not crash on it... this as a bug that we
should fix since objects with "NONE" geometries are a valid case coming
from MapInfo and other GIS formats.

FYI I filed this in the MapServer bugzilla at
  http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=169


> I think it's supposed to be joined
> with the table shown above. It's signature looks like this. How
> would I do a "join" to display, for instance the Address field of
> Eslocs.TAB?
> 

Usually the dataset will be joined in MapInfo and you'll have a third
.TAB file (with NO associated .MAP/.DAT/.ID/.IND) that defines the join
between the two .TAB files.  You should point to this .TAB file in your
OGR connection and what MapServer will see will be the joined table.  If
you don't have a join .TAB file then you're out of luck.  You cannot use
MapServer or OGR to perform a join on the fly except via that special
MapInfo .TAB join file.

If you have several files and cannot tell which one is doing the join
then look at the contents of all your .TAB files in a text editor
(they're text files) and you'll find one that contains what looks like a
SQL SELECT statement... that's the one you want to point to.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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