[R-sig-Geo] Building Windows binary of rgdal package to include PGeo driver for reading ESRI personal geodatabases.

[Roger Bivand]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012, Obrien, Josh wrote:

> I am a long-time R user, currently working with a team of ArcGIS users. 
> The GIS guys would like to be able pass me data in the form of ESRI 
> personal geodatabases (*.mdb), but the OGR driver that reads such files 
> (PGeo) is not included in the Windows rgdal binary.
>
> Roger Bivand's 2008 book (p 111) and the "README.windows" file located 
> in rgdal's main directory both have the same advice for me. They tell me 
> that "the R Windows binary rgdal package can be built against an FWTools 
> binary, using VC++."

Josh,

Could you please try to install R-devel for Windows:

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html

and install the CRAN binary of rgdal? Prof. Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges 
have been continuing their excellent support for us and the whole 
community, and as part of build train enhancements for forthcoming 2.15 on 
Windows, have built GDAL with more dependencies, including ODBC. For me on 
R-devel, ogrDrivers() now shows:

23   MapInfo File  TRUE
24         Memory  TRUE
25   MSSQLSpatial  TRUE
26           ODBC  TRUE
27        OpenAir FALSE
28         PCIDSK  TRUE
29            PDS FALSE
30         PGDump  TRUE
31           PGeo FALSE

where FALSE means that the driver cannot write Pgeo files. It would be 
helpful if you could try it out, which may well mean finding out how to 
declare the Pgeo data source through ODBC or some such.

If you can find out how to use the driver, it may be simpler to go with 
2.15 as Devel will become, most likely in April 2012, than try to build 
using FWTools or OSGeo4W.

Hope this helps,

Roger

>
> My questions are these:
>
> 1) What does it mean to "build against" an FWTools binary? I have installed FWTools on my machine, so is the only  additional requirement that I add the path to it (presumably something like "C:\Program Files\FWTools2.4.7\bin") to my Windows PATH environment variable? Do I need to give the compiler other directions to the DLLs it'll be looking to link in?
>
> 2) Do I really need to use VC++, or is there a way to do the compilation with gcc? If anyone here has done that, do you have any advice about particular flags I'll need? Otherwise, will I likely need to go buy some version of VC++?
>
> 3) Or is there some easier solution that I'm missing? Because we're packaging this up for use by others, I'd prefer not to have to do any of the conversions by hand using the FWTools binary, and the ArcGIS folks would strongly prefer not to pass me info in shapefiles, so those two are right now options of last resort.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Josh O'Brien
>
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no