TILE4MS syntax needed for DOS

[Ed McNierney]

Yar -

I'll try to cover all your issues - tile4ms should not be difficult to
use.

1. There's nothing special about using tile4ms on DOS (Windows, I
presume).

2. tile4ms and gdaltindex perform completely analogous services, one for
shapefiles and one for raster images.  I don't know why you think
tile4ms wouldn't improve your performance.

3. tile4ms allows you to take multiple shapefiles and treat them as a
single logical shapefile.

4. tile4ms doesn't quite "improve" the performance of your 78
independent shapefiles - it simply makes them easier to manage, since
you can treat them all in a single MapServer layer rather than having 78
different LAYER blocks in your map file, one for each shapefile.
However, you could obtain the same result by merging your 78 shapefiles
into a single shapefile.  That would give you POORER performance (in
most common cases) so in that sense the tile4ms approach gives you
better performance than that likely alternative.

5. You can use wildcards like "dir *.shp >tile4ms.in" to cover all the
SHP files without getting the DBF files.

6. It appears that you are now using tile4ms properly, and you're doing
all the right steps.  You are getting an error message that the
shapefile attributes do not match, and you must fix that if you're going
to use tile4ms.  As I said above, tile4ms makes multiple input
shapefiles act like a single logical shapefile; to do that, they all
have to look the same, as if they were pieces of the same shapefile.

If you're getting that error message, then the attribute tables (the
.DBF files) are not the same for each shapefile.  If you look at the DBF
files in a database program, or if you load the shapefiles into ESRI
software or other shapefile viewers, you can look at the "attributes" of
the shapefile.  You will see that the file causing the error does not
have the same columns with the same properties as the other files.

This is a fatal problem for tile4ms.  If, for example, 77 of your
shapefiles have a "POPULATION" column/attribute and one does not,
tile4ms cannot treat them as one logical file.  The input files must all
have the same columns, in the same order.

You can also use the dbfdump utility (part of the shapelib distribution)
as a command-line tool to examine the contents of your 78 shapefiles.

     - Ed

Ed McNierney
TopoZone.com

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Yar Doroshenko
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 7:43 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] TILE4MS syntax needed for DOS

Thank You Ethan!

Would anyone have an example of using tile4ms in DOS environment? Again,
I'm working with shapefiles. Please see my previous messages above.