Announcing: FDO Toolbox 1.5.3

Here's the first stop of the tour, a new release of FDO Toolbox.

I knew that a new release of FDO Toolbox would be coming when I was using the previous 1.5.2 release and it spectacularly failed in my dogfooding of trying to load some GDA2020 SHP files to SQL Server. The actual problem was actually pretty minor, but this inevitably started a chain of dealing with many other annoyances and reported issues, culminating in this release you see here.

Here's a summary of notable changes in this release.

The configuration support check has been fixed so that the configuration doc field is enabled based on actual provider capability check instead of the previously (dumb) approach of checking the provider name. This means the configuration document field is no longer disabled when connecting to PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases and one can finally supply a XML configuration document to apply schema overrides!

The data store editor in standalone mode now supports deleting schemas, to support the common FDO schema override use case of trimming out extraneous schemas and feature classes.

The annoyance of loading a saved bulk copy definition file and a whole bunch of connections with "Connection1/Connection2/Connection3" names being created is now fixed. We will now try to use the original name on the definition file if there is no open connection using the same name.

Also did you know that FDO Toolbox has a neat little feature to help you easily visualize geometry WKT?

You probably didn't know because this feature was hidden in the depths of the FDO Expression Editor when editing FDO expressions or filters and could not be accessed on its own.

That's why in this release, the Geometry Visualizer is now also accessible from the Tools menu.

Finally, to return back to the original issue motivating the production of this new release, the ExtendedCoordSys.txt support file for the SQL Server FDO provider has been updated to match the copy from current FDO trunk and has been updated with a CS alias mapping for GDA2020, allowing one to create spatial contexts on a SQL Server data store with this particular coordinate system (and many others!)

Now onto the next tour stop!

Download

The "I haven't forgotten about you $PROJECT" tour

As I said near the end of my MGOS 4.0 Beta 1 announcement, I will be momentarily stepping away from MapGuide development/maintenance to give some of my sibling projects in the MapGuide/FDO space some long-overdue attention.

So for the next few weeks, I will be embarking on the "I haven't forgotten about you $PROJECT" tour with stopovers at the following projects:

mapguide-react-layout

Next Release: 0.14.8

Objectives: This will be the last release in the 0.14.x series and the last release to officially support Internet Explorer.

MapGuide Maestro

Next Release: 6.0m12

Primary Objective: This release will have authoring parity with MapGuide Open Source 4.0 Beta 1

Secondary Objective: Assorted fixes and minor enhancements

FDO Toolbox

Next Release: 1.5.3

Objective: Some fixes for bugs and usability problems reported since 1.5.2

mapguide-rest

Next Release: 1.0 RC6

Yes! I am finally giving this project some very-overdue attention!

Primary Objective: Make sure it is compatible with PHP 8.1 that is bundled with MapGuide Open Source 4.0 Beta 1. Also doubles as a secondary sanity test of the new vanilla SWIG-generated PHP bindings, which is my main motivator for revisiting this project.

Secondary Objective: See if we can do this will still being able to support older PHP versions bundled with older MapGuide versions. If this is not tenable, we may need to branch codebases and make separate releases. I hope that this is not the case.

When I finish this tour, then I will be returning to get MapGuide Open Source 4.0 to the final release finish line