Assign special dbf to shapefile

[Holger Floerke]

Hi Jacob,

> Why would you not want to join them?
If the information I would like to present is evaluated at runtime, I have
to produce a full set of ".shp", ".dbf", "sbx", "sbn", and ".shx" files. The
shapes always stays the same, but the data is extracted from a database on a
user's query. I would like to save space by not copying the shape
information every time.

> unless if you created a join on a dbf, and accessed it separately.
Is it possible to join external data sources (one or more dbf-files or
oci-sources) to shape files at runtime with the mapserver-api?

HolgeR


Jacob Delfos schrieb:

> 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
>