[postgis-devel] Adding size to LWGEOM

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Paul Ramsey wrote:

> As I fart around with building multi-geometries, I am getting
> increasingly annoyed that I can't just efficiently add new geometries
> to an existing object.  If LWGEOM had a size_t indicating how big the
> allocated dynamic segment was, I could build a bunch of simple
> accessors that filled out the allocated area, and doubled it when it
> get too small.  Basically like the dynptarray idea, but in the main
> objects. Since the LWGEOMs aren't serialized directly, there's no real
> size penalty to doing this, i don't think (time to read the
> serialize/deserialize code). and the on-disk format wouldn't change,
> so it would be backward compatible.
> 
> This is an idle thought, it's certainly possible to code around this
> (that's what I'm doing) but it just seems like I'm writing lots of
> code that isn't strictly necessary.
> 
> p.

I'm not sure I quite follow what you mean here - the LWGEOM structure 
for a multi/collection type contains a pointer to the sub-geometry and 
not the geometry data itself so this shouldn't be relevant?

If you want to add a sub-geometry in a certain position within a 
multi/collection type then look at the *_add functions in lwm*.c within 
the liblwgeom directory.

NOTE TO SELF: These functions look as if they are slow and leak memory 
as they deep-copy each individual geometry into a new array. In fact, 
all you need to do is shuffle the pointer array to include the new entry.


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland
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