[Xastir] Saved station tracklogs in shp format... another proposal.

[Tom Russo]

Since nobody came up with a downside, I just made the change described below.

>From now on, if you have shapelib enabled and choose "store track" in the 
station info dialog, the shapefile will have a "Label" field that has the 
name of the station (or object) you saved in it.  There is a global "signature 
based" dbfawk file that will label and render the map just the way it would 
have before this change if you moved the shapefile to the GPS directory.  Now, 
however, the shapefile's color and rendering will be determined by the dbfawk 
file, not by the name of the file and the directory it's in.  Unless, of course,
you have dbfawk disabled in which case the old behavior will remain.

If you want to customize rendering of a stored track, just copy the global
dbfawk file from /usr/local/share/xastir/config/stored_track.dbfawk to the
same directory as the shapefile, give it the same base name as the shapefile
(e.g. "foo.dbfawk" to go with "foo.shp"), and customize away.  The local copy
will be used instead of the signature based one.

This should make it easier to do on-the-fly hackage with stored tracks, which 
was more of a pain with the name-based version (as I discovered during an
xastir demo last weekend).

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 11:55:56PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <russo at bogodyn.org> flavor, containing:
> I just noticed that when we save station tracks in xastir to shapefile, 
> it's creating a dbf file with almost no data attributes, and adding a
> "_Red" to the file name.  Presumably, if one were to move the shapefiles 
> so stored into the GPS maps directory, that _Red would have made sure that 
> the station track would be displayed in the same hard-coded way that 
> the GPS tracks used to be when dbfawk wasn't enabled.
> 
> I think it's time to make the saved station tracks have more info in the
> dbf file (e.g. callsign) and have the rendering controled by a dbfawk file. 
> To do this, though, I'll probably have to hack on the "create_shapefile_map"
> function so it can be passed a name, change the dbf file output so it adds 
> an extra field ("Name"), and create a global dbfawk file that would render
> the file so that the track is labeled with that name, and displays much as
> it would if it had been moved to the GPS directory.  
> 
> The global dbfawk file could always be copied to a per-file version to be
> tweaked to display different colors, line styles, or widths.
> 
> If I do this, it shouldn't really have much effect on people who have 
> a stash of saved station track shapefiles --- it'd mostly effect how new
> ones are created, and since the rendering would be controlled by the new 
> dbfawk file that wouldn't even be applied to old files, I don't see any 
> downside to this change.  Can anyone think of one?   If not, I might try to
> do that Friday afternoon.
> 
> -- 
> Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
> Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
> "And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
>  one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
>  oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick
> _______________________________________________
> Xastir mailing list
> Xastir at xastir.org
> http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick