[R-sig-Geo] Saving a spatial point object into a shapefile

[Edzer Pebesma]

On 11/04/2010 11:34 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Edzer Pebesma
> <edzer.pebesma at uni-muenster.de> wrote:
> 
>> Because the documentation sais so. ?writeOGR tells me:
>>
>> Usage:
>>
>>     writeOGR(obj, dsn, layer, driver, dataset_options = NULL,
>> layer_options=NULL, verbose = FALSE)
>>
>> Arguments:
>>
>>     obj: a SpatialPointsDataFrame, SpatialLinesDataFrame, or a
>>          SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object.
> 
> Although that's not what the code says:
> 
>  if (!"data" %in% names(getSlots(class(obj))))
>         stop("obj of wrong class")
> 
>  - it just looks to see if there's a 'data' slot in the argument, and
> then carries on, stumbling blindly into all sorts of problems if one
> is dumb enough to create a class with a data slot:
> 
>  > setClass("foo",representation(data="numeric"))
>  > z=new("foo")
>  > writeOGR(z,dsn="/tmp",layer="pts",driver="ESRI Shapefile")
> Error in writeOGR(z, dsn = "/tmp", layer = "pts", driver = "ESRI Shapefile") :
>   NULL NULL unknown data type
> 
> Surely there should be _methods_ for writeOGR for classes that it
> supports, such as SpatialPointsDataFrame. Explicitly testing for the
> presence of a slot/member is worse than explicitly testing for the
> name of a class when you should really use 'inherits' which is worse
> than the correct approach which is writing methods...
> 
>  *end mini-rant* :)

Although you're the first one to bring up this feature (bug?) of
writeOGR, I fully agree. Using methods would also allow e.g. package
raster to define a writeGDAL method for Raster, stacks, bricks, and the
like. In that case we might have to define the method first in sp (rgdal
depends on sp), so that other package don't require rgdal - CRAN still
does not provide OS-X and solaris ports.

> 
> Barry

-- 
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster
Weseler Straße 253, 48151 Münster, Germany. Phone: +49 251
8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763  http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de
http://www.52north.org/geostatistics      e.pebesma at wwu.de