AmigoCloud's GDAL/OGR Plugin for ArcGIS

This repository contains the source code for the GDAL/OGR Plugin which is part of the AmigoCloud Mobile Data Collection Suite

Purpose

The GDAL/OGR Plugin adds read support to any of the vector formats supported by GDAL/OGR.

Some popular formats include:

• SQLite / Spatialite
• NoSQL CouchDB / GeoCouch
• Google Fusion Tables
• AutoCAD DWG and DXF
• GPS Exchange Format (GPX)
• OpenStreetMap XML and PBF
• MapInfo TAB and MIF/MID
• MySQL
• S57 Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC)
• Microsoft Office Excel Format
• ...and much much more!

Screenshots

• OGR Add data dialog

• Spatialite and S57 files being read natively from ArcGIS

License

BSD License. For those of you not in Open Source geekdom, it means "hella free". You can pretty much, do whatever you want with it - Commercial or not. We ask that you please contribute any modifications back if you are kind enough to make modifications, but you are not forced to.

Download / Ready to use Binaries

OK, these have some COM registration issues (if you compile it in your machine it will work fine). Will post some COM registration files to fix the issue. You can find experimental binaries here. They are known to work on ArcGIS 10.1.

To use them:

• Download and unzip file to any folder on your system.
• In ArcMap: Click on Customize->Toolbars->Customize...
• Click on "Add From File"
• Choose OGRPlugin.tlb
• If succesful you will see a new "Add OGR Layer" command that was added. Drag it to a toolbar...
• Enjoy.

User Information (for Developer information see below)

User FAQ

• My spatialite is added to ArcMap as a standlone (i.e non-spatial table)

  Make sure your sqlite files are spatialite files. For this, there needs to be some metadata tables. Don't add them manually though. Use the init_spatialite.sql file instead. Once you are done with this, the last thing to do is to make sure that the tables are registered with the geometry_columns table. If you are using the Spatialite GUI, this is as easy as right clicking on the geometry column and chooseing the Recover Geometry option. If you are doing it through the command prompt, you will find that the RecoverGeometryColumn is what you are looking for. Remember that ArcGIS only knows about FeatureClasses with specific geometry types (i.e POINT, MULTIPOINT, POLYGON, etc) and doesn't know how to interpret generic "GEOMETRY" declarations. In short, make sure that the entry in the geometry_columns specifies a specific geometry type if you want it to be added as a FeatureLayer in ArcMap.

Developer Information

Compiling

This project uses the GDAL CSharp Bindings and of course GDAL, so you will need to get binaries for those. If you don't want to go through the trouble of compiling GDAL from scratch, you should try the GDAL SDK binaries compiled by Tamas Szekeres which I used to write the initial version of this Plugin. Remember that you need the 32 bit version because for some God-forsaken reason, ArcMap is still compiled for a 32-bit architecture even in 2012. At the time of this writing, I used release-1600-gdal-1-9-1-mapserver-6-0-3.zip. By the time you read this, a much newer version must exist.

Developer FAQ

• My dll gets loaded but my breakpoints are not being hit. Help?

  Ah yes, I ran into this problem, too. Turns out that if you compile against the 4.0.NET Runtime, you will need to make a slight change to the ArcMap.exe.config file that is shipped with ArcGIS. This little detail is described in their documentation. After changing the supportedRuntime section, your breakpoints will be hit.

• Why is this implemented as a WorkspacePlugin? Doesn't it give you read support only?

  I started writing everything on C++ implementing every single COM interface that the GeoDatabase uses so that I would fool ArcMap/ArcCatalog into thinking I was a full-blown GeoDatabase. I had it somewhat working, but there was always some interface that I had missed (and was not documented properly). After hearing directly from the source, that in the next ArcGIS release, WorkspacePlugin's will have write support, I thrashed the other project that was taking weeks to this which only took two days. I don't regret it a bit.

• Does this run on ArcGIS Engine? Or Does it need Desktop?

  Both the ICommands and the WorkspacePlugin code live in the same assembly, so ArcGIS Desktop is required (ArcView / Basic / or whatever the cheapest license is called now should work). There is nothing that is stopping you from separating the commands out and it should be very easy to do. I did not because I did not have an ArcGIS Engine license to test it so why do the work?

• Why did you check-in the .csproj.user file you nimrod!?!? Don't you know you are supposed to leave those out?

  Turns out that I am using Visual Studio Express 2010 to compile and debug this thing. I had to hand edit the proj and the user file to allow firing up ArcMap and have Release/Debug options in my IDE since those options are available on the Express editions of Visual Studio. It seems that is what the ArcGIS Visual Studio Templates also do.

Known Limitations

• Blob fields are not being read

  This is a limitation with the current Swig bindings for OGR. It is being worked on. See the related ticket 4457

• Workspace is readonly

  In ArcGIS 10.1 SP1 (October 2012) ESRI will release a few interfaces that will allow write support to be easily implemented. Let's wait for them :)

Contributing

Please fork this repository and contribute back using pull requests.

Any contributions, large or small, major features, bug fixes, additional language translations, unit/integration tests are welcomed and appreciated but will be thoroughly reviewed and discussed. And of course it would make you cool. You want to be cool right?