Earlier today, Haris Kurtagic at SL-King announced the initial release of a new FDO¹ provider for SpatiaLite. This is great news, adding to the native SpatiaLite² support ecosystem which includes GDAL/OGR, QGIS, GeoAlchemy, and probably others (let me know in the comments!).

Being in a precipitous mood, I decided to plunge in and get my clichés wet. The first step was to attempt to use the new provider with Jackie Ng‘s FDO Toolbox, my go-to GUI tool for examining FDO data sets. I followed these steps:

1. Downloaded the 32 bit FDO 3.5 version of the new SpatiaLite provider from the SL-King website.
2. Copied all of the files into my C:\Program Files\FDO Toolbox\FDO directory.
3. Copied the contents of the providers_kingspatialite_entry.xml file into the providers.xml file before the closing FeatureProviderRegistry tag, modifying the FDO version string to 3.5.
4. Discovered that something had a dependency on the MS Visual C++ 7.1 runtime, so I found msvcr71.dll and msvcp71.dll on another PC and copied them into the same directory

With this in place, I was able to quickly connect to the SpatiaLite demo database:

And browse and visualize the data:

Confidence buoyed, I decided to take it a step further and attempt to connect to the same data in MapGuide. The initial steps were the same as for FDO Toolbox (adding the provider to the MapGuide FDO folder).

Once configured, I was able to quickly add a connection to the test database, but I had to manually hack in a coordinate system reference and map extents. This is due to an incompatibility between SpatiaLite and MapGuide’s coordinate system handling, and I’m hoping that the WKT projection support in the next version of SpatiaLite allows Haris to fix this.

With the data connection and its spatial context override in place, creating layer and map definitions was dead easy, and allowed me to quickly get to data visualization.

Next Up? Making the SpatiaLite FDO provider work with GeoREST. Out of time for tonight though…

UPDATE (2010-09-01): I was able to get the SpatiaLite provider working with the current preview version of GeoREST with very little difficulty, and the next official build of GeoREST will probably include this provider. If you’d like to play around with it earlier, you can download a totally unsupported package of GeoREST with Spatialite from my temp files area for a limited time only :)

-J

Notes:

1. FDO is a geospatial object/relational mapping framework, allowing consistent programmatic access to dozens of GIS data formats. It is used by MapGuide Open Source, FDO Toolbox, GeoREST, Autodesk’s geospatial products like Topobase, MapGuide Enterprise and AutoCAD Map 3D, and is also included in applications like Safe Software‘s FME and 1Spatial‘s MapRelate.

2. SpatiaLite takes SQLite‘s concept of database-in-a-file, and turns it into geodatabase-in-a-file, offering a full suite of geospatial query abilities in a lightweight extension to SQLite. FDO already has a robust SQLite provider that uses its own open geometry format, metadata, and spatial functions. In contrast, SL-King‘s new provider is intended for users who prefer to use the SpatiaLite geometry format, and takes advantage of SpatiaLite’s built-in GIS capabilities.