Archive for category Utilities

Now we’re cooking! MgCooker for MapGuide Tile Seeding

Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, OSGeo, Open Source, Utilities on February 19, 2009

The latest preview release of MapGuide Maestro (r3620 currently) comes with a nice little surprise:  a tool for pre-seeding tile caches.  MgCooker can be run from the command line (more on this later), or through the Maestro GUI.  It couldn’t be simpler.  Open up a Map Definition that has a Base Layer Group, highlight the group that you want to cook, and click on the MgCooker icon:

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In the following dialog, either leave the default of all checked, or choose to only pre-render certain zoom levels of your data, the choice is yours (probably best to start with the smallest scale – in this case 100,000):

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Then click "Build tiles now" and sit back and watch the tiles cook:

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Of course, this isn’t practical for a production environment where you would want to batch this operation.  That’s where the second option comes in; clicking on "Save as script" generates a Windows batch file similar to the following that you can script to your heart’s desire:

"C:Program FilesOSGeoMapGuide MaestroMgCookerCommandline.exe" batch
   --mapdefinitions="Library://Samples/Sheboygan/MapsTiled/Sheboygan.MapDefinition"
   --basegroups="Base Layer Group"
   --scaleindex=7
   --mapagent="http://localhost:8008/mapguide/mapagent/mapagent.fcgi"

I have no idea if the MgCookerCommandLine.exe works under Mono, but given that the rest of Maestro seems to work fairly well there I would not be surprised.

Great job Kenneth; this is something we have been sorely missing since MapGuide 1.2, and it’s great to see it as part of Maestro!

-J

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Data Warehousing Goodness with FDO Toolbox (sorta)

Posted by Jason Birch in Data Transformation, FDO, Open Source, Utilities on August 7, 2008

Ok, not real data warehousing (no star schema here) but anyone who has dealt with performance issues in MapGuide due to on-the-fly joins across heterogeneous data sources knows the value of loading read-only data sets into static SDF (or SQLite!) files for rapid display.

With release 0.50 of FDO Toolbox, Jackie has done it again by allowing users to quickly take data from both spatial (FDO) data sources, and non-spatial (OLEDB) data sources, join them together, and write out performance-optimized files. This is a huge boon for folks that need to do this and can’t afford best-of-breed proprietary tools like Safe Software’s FME.

Jackie has really impressed me with the rapid development of this tool as well as his focus on providing value in three distinct areas. First, FDO Toolbox has a great GUI for FDO data transfer and administration. Second, the command line capabilities allow you to set up scheduled translations to keep your SDF files in sync with your corporate data stores. Finally, FDO Toolbox has a minimal profile and can easily be used by install scripts that need to load data, register FDO providers, and other tasks during an automated application installation.

What’s next on the horizon? Jackie’s recent post on an FDO plug-in for SharpMap provides a hint… spatial data inspection coming soon to FDO Toolbox! Now if there was only a way of plugging FDO Toolbox into MapGuide Maestro to transform data and either create packages or load data directly into MapGuide. ;)

-J

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FDO Toolbox (Speaking of Rapid Development)

Posted by Jason Birch in FDO, Open Source, Utilities on July 28, 2008

According to the author, “FDO Toolbox is a windows application to process, create and manage geospatial data”. Similar in purpose to SL-King’s FDO2FDO application (which hasn’t quite made it out into open source yet), FDO Toolbox takes a different tack in design and in development process.

I first heard about FDO Toolbox when I got a Google Alert about Jackie Ng’s initial blog post back on July 9th. Since that time, Jackie has posted seven new point releases. That’s seven releases in eleven nineteen days, people!.

Obviously, this insane development pace can’t continue forever, but up until now Jackie has been working furiously with a good number of fixes and new features in each release. Many of the enhancements and modifications have come from external suggestions, so if you try it out and find that it’s missing something or think it could be doing something better, don’t hesitate to make a suggestion.

-J

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MapGuide Maestro (a brief introduction)

Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, Open Source, Utilities on July 28, 2008

For a large part of MapGuide Open Source’s history, you could only author maps using either Autodesk’s MapGuide Studio, which is a great and relatively inexpensive tool but not open source, or Web Studio which was never finished to the point that it could be used to build a MapGuide application from scratch.

In September of last year, Kenneth Skovhede changed this with the introduction of Map Studio Open Source. This application, built using C# and supported under .Net and Mono, was immediately more functional that Web Studio.

Fast forward seven months. Having built considerable support and functionality in a short amount of time, Map Studio Open Source was clearly a viable project and was providing benefit to the MapGuide Open Source community. After some discussions between Kenneth and the MapGuide project steering committee, an RFC was created to bring Map Studio Open Source officially into the MapGuide fold. This included a change of name to MapGuide Maestro and a move from Google Code to MapGuide’s OSGeo-hosted wiki, bug tracking, source control, and download services.

If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like, there are some screen shots on the MapGuide wiki… but beware; this project is under rapid development (release early and often) and some of the images are already out of date :)

My advice? Don’t even look at the screenshots, just download Maestro and start using it. Even if you have the full Autodesk MapGuide Studio application, there are some things that Maestro does far better, like retaining inter-resource references when moving things in your repository, or defining raster configuration files for unmanaged image resources. And if you run into problems, make sure to report them so that they can be fixed quickly (and they probably will be).

-J

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Listing MapGuide Data File Locations

Posted by Jason Birch in Code, MapGuide, Open Source, Utilities on November 17, 2007

Over on the MapGuide Users mailing list, Zac said: "it would be nice to add a text file listing the unmanaged resources"

Happy to oblige! :)

OK, not quite, but I’ve created a simple command-line PHP script that talks to the MapGuide repository and outputs a CSV containing the ResourceID and File Path for all data sources that I’ve recognised as file-based. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to filter this to only show unmanaged data sources.

Sample output:

C:\MgTest\listpaths>php cli_listfiles.php admin

“Library://Test/Data/MyImages.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages2.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages3.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_sid”
“Library://Test/Data/ABC123.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw\”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages4.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_sid\”
“Library://ImageTest/Data/ImageTest.FeatureSource”,”C:\ImageTest”
“Library://ImageTest/Data/Tiled.FeatureSource”,”C:\ImageTest\”
“Library://SdfTest/Data/bc_border.FeatureSource”,”%MG_DATA_FILE_PATH%”

I think this shows how easy it is to throw around the XML that MapGuide uses in its repositories.

-J

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