[postgis-users] QGIS - PostGIS - ArcGIS Interaction

[James David Smith]

Dear all,

I appreciate that this is more of a QGIS query, but I think that the
route of the problem might be in PostGIS, so... I have opened QGIS and
ran the query on my PostGIS table as below:

SELECT * FROM incidents
WHERE urgency = 'Immediate'
AND date_time_of_arrival - date_time_unit_assigned > '00:12:00'

This gives me 33 points in QGIS. Great. I would now however like to
save this as a ShapeFile for use in ArcGIS with which I am more
familiar, but when I try to SAVE AS from QGIS I am given the following
error....

Export to vector file failed.
Error: trimming attribute name 'date_time_of_arrival' to ten
significant characters produces duplicate column name.

I am guessing that the problem here is that ESRI shapefiles can only
deal with column names that are ten characters long...? And that as I
also have a column called 'date_time_of_departure', when QGIS trims
this column it ends up with two columns called the same thing?  Is
there a way around this? I realise I could rename the column in QGIS,
but I actually have around 45 columns in the table and this problem
will occur with about 15 pairs of them I think. I guess there is no
simple answer... but thought I'd ask.

Cheers

James