suggestion for spgrass6 - temp file in readVECT6
On Thursday, December 09, 2010, Pierre Roudier wrote:
Dear all,
I got a suggestion for spgrass6. As far as I understand it, a
temporary ESRI shapefile is written on the disk when using
readVECT6('foo'), I guess then R is using rgdal to read that shapefile
back in memory. Considering the various limitations of the ESRI
shapefile format that does not occur with the GRASS internal format,
could it be possible to add an option to choose the OGR format used in
that process?
Also got a question for Roger I guess: I'm using now the grass7 svn
trunk, should I expect any problems using the spgrass6 interface (I
mean problems due to structural differences that appears in grass7
that would not be handled by spgrass6, not problems due to grass7
itself).
Thanks,
Pierre
This is an excellent point Pierre, and something that has caused significant pain the past-- in terms of column names and NULL value handling. Not everyone's GDAL/OGR will be configured in the same way-- so I don't know if altering the default behavior would be wise. However, adding an option (as you suggested) to use some other format, such as SQLite, would give power users a nice alternative to SHP format. SQLite would allow for longer field names, proper support for NULL data, and probably some other 'good things'. Dylan
Dylan Beaudette Soil Resource Laboratory http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/ University of California at Davis 530.754.7341