[R-sig-Geo] Writing ArcGIS Shapefiles from R; advice?

[Michael Sumner]

I can't see any easy way through this, since the other ESRI formats
that do support separate layers are not writeable by OGR:

(from the OGR formats page: http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html)
Arc/Info Binary Coverage  AVCBin
 Arc/Info .E00 (ASCII) Coverage  AVCE00
 ESRI Personal GeoDatabase  PGeo
 ESRI ArcSDE  SDE

I would see if any of the other OGR formats can work for your
colleagues, but it doesn't look hopeful.

Shapefiles do not support formatting (colours, line styles etc) at
all. There is an auxiliary format file that can accompany shapefiles,
but AFAIK this is only understood by ESRI and is not part of the
shapefile definition (much as PRJ/WKT is not either).

Again, some of the other OGR formats may work for you.  A (desperate?)
non-open source, Windows-only solution might be to use Manifold
Enterprise to write .E00 - I'd be happy to try this out with example
data, at least to see what might be possible.

Cheers, Mike.

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Shapefiles don't have separate layers, and one layer can only have one
> geometry type (point, line, or polygon). GDAL can treat a single
> folder with multiple shapefiles as if each shapefile were a separate
> layer in a single dataset, but that is just GDAL functionality,
> reflecting the OGR model, and is supported by other vector formats.
>
> I'm not very familiar with Arc? products, so I'm not 100% on this, but
> I think you would need to write each separate set of polygons, each
> with an individual depth value, to a separate shapefile and proceed
> from there. I don't know anything about how to get Arc to understand
> configurations of shapefiles, but perhaps you could use one of the
> other ESRI formats such as E00 (guessing here, I'll have a closer look
> at the OGR formats - see rgdal's ogrDrivers() for the ones available
> on your system).
>
> If your SpatialPolygonsDataFrame really has multiple duplicate (in
> X/Y) polygons with the separate depths, you can subset it for
> individual depths with "[" and write those out individually:
>
> e.g.
>
> depth0 <- splydf[splydf$depth == 0, ]
>
> HTH
>
> Cheers, Mike
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Gavin Simpson <gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Dear List,
>>
>> Firstly, a confession: I'm not a GIS expert and I have next to no
>> experience of using ArcGIS or shapefiles. Apologies if anything I write
>> below is stupid!
>>
>> I have an ESRI ASCII grid file that I have read into R and successfully
>> (with the help of this list) processed it into a
>> SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object (via SpatialPixelsDataFrame). I have
>> unionised the polygons to a set of depth intervals, so all the
>> individual polygons associated with depths (say) between 1 and 2 m are
>> given the same ID; there are several depth intervals, therefore several
>> IDs. This is fine, and I'm happy with this, but I need to export this
>> object to ESRI Shapefile(s).
>>
>> I have exported the whole SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object to a single
>> shapefile but when my colleagues open this in ArcGIS, there is a single
>> layer for all depth levels and they'd like to be able to have a layer
>> per polygon ID. Is this possible, to write out the
>> SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object such that ArcGIS knows that each polygon
>> ID is a separate layer?
>>
>> I have worked out how to break apart the SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object
>> into the equivalent but with a single ID (depth interval), and have
>> written those out into separate shapefiles, one per depth interval,
>> which when loaded into ArcGIS are represented by separate layers, but
>> dealing with more than a few shapefiles at once is proving
>> "difficult" (!??!) for some, hence if it were possible to produce a
>> single shapefile with separate "layers" that might solve that particular
>> issue.
>>
>> Second Q is; is there a way to include information about how ArcGIS
>> displays each layer/shapefile? For example, we'd like to give each
>> layer/shapefile a particular fill colour, so that when loaded by a user
>> into ArcGIS, the particular depth polygons have a nice gradient
>> representing depth. Is this even remotely possible from within R, or is
>> this something ArcGIS does and is separate from the shapefile per se?
>>
>> Currently I am using writeOGR to read out these objects to ESRI
>> shapefiles.
>>
>> The reason I ask these questions is because we have a lot of these lake
>> bathymetries and dealing with them in ArcGIS (to get separate layers and
>> colour those layers accordingly) by hand is a non starter and we don't
>> want to start writing VB scripts in Arc at this stage.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions you may have. And
>> apologies again for showing my ignorance as regards shapefiles.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Gavin
>>
>> --
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>>  Dr. Gavin Simpson             [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
>>  ECRC, UCL Geography,          [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565
>>  Pearson Building,             [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk
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>
>
>
> --
> Michael Sumner
> Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
> Hobart, Australia
> e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com
>



-- 
Michael Sumner
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Hobart, Australia
e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com