Contours again.

[Armin Burger]

Bob,

you could also try just creating a spatial index for the shapefile using shptree. 2 minutes looks like there is no existing spatial index and more or less all features of the shapefile are read all the time. Maybe this index already speeds up things sufficiently.

Instead of splitting up the contour lines into seperate shapefiles that have then to be put together with a shapeindex, it might be an alternative to intersect the contour lines with a regular grid. E.g. like the sheets for topographic maps or a rectangular one with arbitrary extent you create on your own. That way very long lines with huge amount of vertices are split up into smaller chunks. The time to read such features is much less than for the large ones, but you still have everything in a single shapefile.

If you want just display the values as integer, it might be the easiest way to add a new integer column in the dbf file and copy the values from the float column. And then use the new integer column  for the labeling.

armin

> All,

> Well I tried out a composite file before asking this question.

> I just ran a 550+meg SHP file for our Contour data.  There is only one
> attribute in the DBF, which is the elevation.

> a Typical request takes around 120 sec to complete.  so I'm going to try
> and tile the shp file out into smaller version and use a tile index on
> top of that.  Are there any pitfalls I should watch out for during the
> process of tiling a SHP file?


> Also, how do I label with a INTEGER vs a REAL for the elevations.  I'm
> getting  14 decimal places in the labels.  :c)


> Thanks

> bobb