ArcSDE and compiling versions of OGR / MapServer

[Mike Saunt]

Hi all

This is rather a long question but...

Today I ran into an issue with ArcSDE which luckily for me the latest MS4W
resolved (thanks to everyone's efforts in keeping things current) which
leads me onto a question.

Our solution also uses the OGR tools and specifically ogrinfo to find out
field names from ESRI shape files or MapInfo Tab files.  We have been quite
fortunate in that we have been able to use the compiled binaries from
FWTools (and another thanks to Frank for these!).  Unfortunately this method
won't work for ArcSDE as FWTools doesn't support ArcSDE.  It got me thinking
to how MapServer now works with the libmap.dll's for different input
formats.

As I don't have client libraries for ArcSDE (but our clients do on their
networks) it may prove difficult to rebuild ogrinfo or even MapServer if say
I wanted to have a higher MAX_SYMBOLS than the default with SDE support.

My question is this:  when compiling with ArcSDE support there is a need for
the c header files or similar from ArcSDE.  Is there a need for the actual
DLL's?  If there is couldn't an open source dummy set of DLL's with all the
external c functions setup be built?  This could potentially allow for
people to have their custom compiles work and also have a custom version
that has been compiled for ArcSDE.  Obviously if anyone wanted to query
ArcSDE in their development environment they would need real DLL's.

Basically it would be great if one could do things how the MS4W works at
present.  I think it is great that you can pop a different libmap.dll (and
other supporting dll's) into the cgi directory and hey presto you have extra
data format support.

I guess there could be potential copyright issues in doing this but it was
just a thought...
Cheers

Mike
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