ESRI File Geodatabase

ESRI File Geodatabases exist in a file folder and offer improved performance and size limitations. For more information see the ESRI description page.

Notitie

Only file geodatabases created by AcrGIS 10.0 and above can be read by GDAL/MapServer.

File listing

File geodatabases are made up of a set of files within a folder. The files are made up of geographic data, attribute data, index files, and lock files. A better description of the file contents can be found here.

Data Access / Connection Method

File geodatabase access is available through OGR. See the OGR driver page for FileGDB for specific driver information. The driver is available for GDAL >= 1.9.0. You may also see the the OGR driver page for OpenFileGDB which provides read-only access and does not require an external SDK to compile.

Notitie

For Windows users, MS4W leverages the OpenFileGDB driver.

The CONNECTION parameter must be used to point to the name of the file folder, and the DATA parameter should be the name of the spatial table (or OGR layer).

CONNECTIONTYPE ogr
CONNECTION "filegdb-folder"
DATA "layername"

Notitie

The CONNECTION path is relative to the mapfile (SHAPEPATH is not used here). Full paths can also be used.

OGRINFO Examples

First you should make sure that your GDAL/OGR build contains the file geodatabase “FileGDB” driver (or the “OpenFileGDB” driver), by using the ‘–formats’ command:

>ogrinfo --formats

   Supported Formats:
   ...
   "FileGDB" (read/write)
   "ESRI Shapefile" (read/write)
   "MapInfo File" (read/write)
   "UK .NTF" (readonly)
   "SDTS" (readonly)
   "TIGER" (read/write)
   ...

If you don’t have the driver, see GDAL’s BuildHints page for compiling the driver.

Once you have the FileGDB driver you are ready to try an ogrinfo command on your database to get a list of spatial tables. In the example below our folder is named us_states.gdb:

ogrinfo us_states.gdb

  INFO: Open of `us_states.gdb'
  using driver `FileGDB' successful.
  1: statesp020 (Multi Polygon)

Now use ogrinfo to get information on the structure of the statesp020 table:

ogrinfo us_states.gdb statesp020 -summary

  INFO: Open of `us_states.gdb'
    using driver `FileGDB' successful.

  Layer name: statesp020
  Geometry: Multi Polygon
  Feature Count: 2895
  Extent: (-179.000000, 17.000000) - (179.000000, 71.000000)
  Layer SRS WKT:
  GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983",
     DATUM["North_American_Datum_1983",
         SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137.0,298.257222101]],
     PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
     UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295]]
  FID Column = OBJECTID
  Geometry Column = SHAPE
  AREA: Real (0.0)
  PERIMETER: Real (0.0)
  STATESP020: Real (0.0)
  STATE: String (0.0)
  STATE_FIPS: String (0.0)

Mapfile Example

LAYER
  NAME "fgdb_poly"
  TYPE POLYGON
  STATUS ON
  CONNECTIONTYPE OGR
  CONNECTION "../data/filegdb/us_states.gdb"
  DATA "statesp020"
  PROCESSING "CLOSE_CONNECTION=DEFER" # for maximum performance
  LABELITEM "STATE"
  CLASS
    NAME "US States"
    STYLE
      COLOR 120 120 120
      OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0
    END
    LABEL
      COLOR 255 255 255
      OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0
    END
  END
END