[Qgis-developer] What happened to FGDB writing support in QGIS?

[James Wood]

I've always wondered why the read-only driver was chosen to be included with the packaged app over the other. Both "open" the fGDB format. The file geodatabase is enough of a ubiquitous exchange format now that it makes sense to me to just include the write option by default instead of having to go install it with each upgrade. I'm also glad that Esri now includes some functionality with the SpatiaLite/Geopackage formats, although, IMHO, it still misses the mark and is lacking in functionality on several levels. The ability to write to a fGDB is definitely a nice option to have. 

I'm running QGIS 2.18.3 and ArcGIS Desktop 10.5/ArcGIS Pro 1.4 on Win10. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 26, 2017, at 14:19, Larry Shaffer <larrys at dakotacarto.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Calvin,
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 9:39 AM, C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I notice that FGDB writing support seems to have been dropped from QGIS. It was in 2.14, but not in 2.16 nor 2.18. What happened? Can it be included back into QGIS?
> 
> FileGDB write support is provided by the GDAL/OGR FileGDB driver, which requires the FileGDB API SDK [0] (that happens to now be under the Apache 2 license [1]), not QGIS itself. When installing QGIS via the OSGeo4W installer, you also have to install the gdal-filegdb package, which is a plugin for GDAL/OGR that provides this write functionality; though, I am not sure which version of the SDK is currently included.
> 
> In other words, the support was not dropped from QGIS, per se, but maybe just not included as a dependent package for GDAL/OGR, given its further proprietary library dependency. Upon looking at the 2.14 OSGeo4W 'full' packaging [2], I don't see that it is included, by default, there as well (at least, not anymore).
> 
> There is also the read-only OpenFileGDB driver [3], included in GDAL/OGR 1.11+. While this does not allow writing, it can be used to dump data into a PostGIS setup (see page).
> 
> [0] http://www.gdal.org/drv_filegdb.html
> [1] https://github.com/Esri/file-geodatabase-api
> [2] http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/x86_64/release/qgis/qgis-ltr-full/setup.hint
> [3] http://www.gdal.org/drv_openfilegdb.html 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Larry Shaffer
> Dakota Cartography
> Black Hills, South Dakota
>  
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Calvin
>> 
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