[postgis-users] Length of Bigint, Double and Text fields

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Peter Hopfgartner wrote:

> Dear PostGIS devels,
> 
> since we right in the middle of comparing interoperability of shape 
> files between some FOSS programs and ArcGIS, we encoutered also the 
> following:
> 
> gvSIG chokes on the Bigint as produced by pgsql2shp. Looking at ArcGIs 
> generated files, the max length for numbers is 19, compared to 20 for 
> integers and 32 for floating points as in pgsql2shp. This seems to be 
> confirmed by some Borland tools, when configured for dBase III+.
> 
> Another limit seems to be that of text fields, that must be no longer 
> then 254. This is the maximum as given by ArcGIS and by the Borland tool.
> 
> Another point is Boolean: ArcGIS seems to not allow the creation of 
> boolean fields and the Borland Tool ("Database Desktop") says that 
> Booleans have a length of 1.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Peter

Hi Peter,

You've brought up some interesting points here. Can you actually clarify 
these changes with regard to parts of the official shapefile spec, or 
have they been found purely through experimentation?


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
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