Assign special dbf to shapefile

[Jacob Delfos]

Hi Holger,

Do you need to be able to access the different kinds of information at the
same time? So in other words, do two ore more kinds of information need to
exist at the same time? Or do the attributes of your shapefile only need to
have one particular value at a time? If you only need to have one value at a
time, I think it would be best if you used PHP to access the DBF, and wrote
the values to the DBF, without renaming the DBF, and without trying to
associate the .shp file with a different DBF. Depending on how many
different 'versions' of the shapefile you need to have at the same time, you
could create X amount of copies of the shapefiles, and change the associated
DBF's at runtime, without having to create more .shp files. Accessing DBF's
with PHP is very easy.

Does that make sense?

regards,

Jacob

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Sent: 1/7/2005 11:08 PM
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Assign special dbf to shapefile

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
>