Assign special dbf to shapefile

[William Bronsema]

Holger,

If you really want to do this and your site has low enough traffic you could
always juggle the files using php.  At run-time re-name the files
accordingly.  I usually avoid touching the disk as much as possible, but if
you need to do it, this is one way to make it work.

FYI - I would recommend to anyone to use a dbf editor as opposed to MS Excel
to edit dbfs, unless you know the ins and out of Excel and how to deal with
named ranges etc.


Regards,
Bill

________________________________________________
William A. Bronsema, C.E.T.
Applications and Software Development,
DM Solutions Group Inc.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Jacob Delfos
> Sent: January 7, 2005 8:31 AM
> To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Assign special dbf to shapefile
>
> Holger,
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but that would be redefining the definition of
> a shapefile. As far as I know, a "shapefile" is not the .shp file, but
> the collection of ".shp", ".dbf", "sbx", "sbn", and ".shx" files. I
> think you'd have to seriously hack the source of mapserver to do that,
> unless if you created a join on a dbf, and accessed it separately.
>
> Why would you not want to join them? If you have access to MS Excel, it
> would be as simple as copying a column across. No doubt other software
> can do the same thing. You would have access to both attributes in one
> shapefile. What is the actual problem that causes you not to want to
> have two shapefiles, and not to want to join the attributes?
>
> regards,
>
> Jacob
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: UMN MapServer Users List
> To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Sent: 1/7/2005 9:03 PM
> Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Assign special dbf to shapefile
>
> Hi all,
>
> am I able to assign a special dbf-file to a shape file? For example
> rendering the 'airports.shp', but using data from
> 'airports_passengers.dbf'
> and not from 'airports.dbf' (ensuring the correct order for the
> shape-information-mapping). Or another example, render some area shapes
> on
> the one hand with popuplation data and on the other hand with
> unemployment
> data without integrating both data sets into the dbf of the shape file
> and
> without producing two different shape-files. I use php-mapscript and
> mapserver 4.4.
>
> HolgeR