FDO Toolbox 0.8.7 (Fresh from FOSS4G)

Here's a new release of FDO Toolbox, fresh from the FOSS4G 2009 conference. This was the exact build I was demonstrating during the presentation, which went better than I expected.

Being my first presentation (ever!), I had been frantically practising the night before just to get the content and pacing right. I guess it all paid off at the end, as the presentation went quite smoothly, with none of the stuttering and loss of words that I had during my test runs :-)

The new main features include:

Enhanced Bulk Copy

The bulk copy mechanism has been drastically improved in this release, it has a whole new user interface and XML file definition. The changes are too much for this post, which I will leave for a future post.

IronPython Scripting

With the introduction of a IronPython scripting engine, FDO Toolbox now has a 2nd extensibility point. You can now customise and drive FDO Toolbox through python scripts. I will be posting some example scripts in the near future to demonstrate what can be done with a scripting engine.

The side-effect of introducing IronPython is that the minimum .net Framework requirement is now 2.0 SP1. The installer has been updated to check for this version. If you have .net Framework 3.5 (or 3.5 SP1) installed, you will already have this installed.

Download

Note: My presentation slides are also available for download from that site. The presentation (as with every presentation at FOSS4G) has been recorded, so expect a video version to crop up soon.

FOSS4G 2009 beckons.

I'll be flying off to Sydney tomorrow for FOSS4G 2009, but I won't be attending Day 1.

Instead, Tuesday will be spent fine-tuning my presentation material with the help of my Sydney-based colleagues for the main event on Wednesday, and I'll be mingling about on Thursday, finally departing mid-Friday afternoon.

Hope to see you there.

Google Earth plays nice with MapGuide again.

Google recently released Google Earth 5.1 and one of the first things I wanted to find out was, if it would play nice with MapGuide again.

After some testing, my conclusion is that everything is fine again. So when you want to consume KML from MapGuide, stay away from Google Earth releases from 4.3 to 5.0

FDO Toolbox v0.8.2(.1)

Time for a new release.

New Features / Changes:

Colorful Map Previews.


Monochromatic map previews are a thing of the past. Though if for some reason you still prefer black and white, there's a new option available in Preferences to enable/disable this

Spatial Indexing Support

Thanks to the C# Spatial Index library we now have basic spatial indexing for our datasets. Because this enables us to finally do intersection testing on our datasets, the Data Preview can now do cool things like:


Expression Editor value fetching


The expression editor has been enhanced with distinct value fetching support. So now not-only do you get property/function auto-complete, now you get value auto-complete as well!

Other Changes

• Added a new option to view the capabilities of any FDO connection.
  
• You can now attempt to fix and correct incompatibilities in the Schema Designer when operating in contextual mode. This is useful for applying schemas to connections with very restrictive capabilities (eg. Shape Files). Before it told you the schema to be applied was incompatible. Now, you can try to do something about it.
  
• Fix some bugs related to fixing schema incompatibilities.
• Fixed crashing on Data Preview for ODBC connections as a result of a half-baked attempt to work around an annoying bug. You should definitely get this release if you work with lots of ODBC connections.
  
• Auto-pad zero-length string properties (to 255) when applying a schema that has zero-length string properties.
  
• Added OGR connection builders for: ESRI Shape Files, ESRI ArcCoverage, Microstation DGN (v7 and older), GeoJSON, S-57, Atlas BNA and OGR Virtual Driver. You can now totally bypass using the Generic connection dialog for the OGR Provider (which for some reason the provider does not want to play nice)
  

EDIT: Release has been pulled because of a showstopper defect that slipped through the cracks. A 0.8.2.1 release will be made available soon that fixes this defect.

EDIT: The 0.8.2.1 release is up. Download away!

Download

Report bugs or feature enhancements

FDO Toolbox v0.8.0

It's been a while since the last release of FDO Toolbox, so here's a new release.

This version finally has working ArcSDE provider support (thank you, Utah State Govt for providing a public ArcSDE instance for me to test :-)), faster Object Explorer loading and that new and enhanced Expression Editor that I've been raving about.

Download

Viewing multiple selected features in the AJAX viewer

One of the limitations with the current AJAX viewer (and a pet peeve of mine) is when you do multiple selections, you get the most unhelpful user feedback ever.


Those of you in Fusion land however, get the proper treatment with regards to multiple selected features. It will display the attributes of all the selected features for you. As shown below.


To do the same thing in the current AJAX viewer requires a custom development effort, which shouldn't have to be, but sadly is the case if you want similar functionality in the AJAX viewer.

I believe functionality as basic as this should have always existed in the AJAX viewer in the first place, which is why as part of my work on MapGuide RFC71, I am porting this functionality to the AJAX viewer.



One thing you may notice is that there is a button beside the selected dropdown. What this does is it allows you to zoom and center on the current selected feature. Allowing you to somewhat wade through that sea of blue polygons in large selection sets.


This zoom level is currently hardcoded to 200, and will probably change as I keep hacking away.

Currently, this new feature is only available for the PHP viewer. The .net and Java viewers will follow in due course (the scope of the RFC covers all 3 viewers). I have tested this on Firefox 3/3.5 and Internet Explorer 7/8 (surpisingly even IE6, that #$^% browser that just refuses to die!), it should also work on Chrome and Safari (RFC scope also covers these web browsers)

If you want to play with this new feature (and I would like people's feedback as I implement this), you will have to do the following:

1) Build mapguide trunk from source.
2) Install to a test machine.
3) Rename the web extensions root (www) directory.
4) Using a subversion client, checkout (or export) a copy of the RFC71 sandbox into your www directory.
5) Copy all the files and folders from the renamed directory into the www directory except for:

• mapviewerphp
• mapviewernet
• mapviewerjava
• stdicons
• viewerfiles
• localized
  

6) Copy constants.php into the checked out mapviewerphp. When the .net implementation is done, you'll have to copy the mapguide dlls into the bin directory of the checked out mapviewernet.

For those of you currently testing the 2.1 beta. Sorry, this feature is scoped for a 2.2 release. But I may be able to find some time to backport this to 2.1 and provide this enhancement as a separate download.

Finally for those of you who do want to test drive this feature (following the above instructions). Just remember that this is a first cut. Expect things to break :-P

Negative buffer analysis

Mike Schlosser has been thinking outside the box, and realised that buffering can go both ways. In his post, he demonstrates buffering using negative distances in AutoCAD Map3D.

Well just out of curiosity I wondered if MapGuide can also handle negative buffers...












Guess so.