Jelmer Baas wrote:
Hmm, so this means I'll have to detect whether or not a .TAB file has a labels or not? I'm not sure if this would be per item, or per .TAB file / layer?
Not just that. You need to detect whether a TAB file has *only* labels in it. Until ticket 2311 is fixed, any object that is not of type TEXT will trigger the error that you got.
Also, I don't think this detection can be done in MapServer, right? Maybe in MapBasic... Would you happen to have any ideas about that, too?
Well, there is no simple flag to turn on in MapServer if that's what you're looking for.
I know that the information is available in the header of the .MAP files of TAB datasets, but it's not easily accessible with any tool. Maybe in MapBasic, I don't know.
The MITAB library (http://mitab.maptools.org/) has access to that information in the TABMAPHeaderBlock C++ class, but you'd need to write custom C++ code to get it. Well the output of MITAB's "tabdump -a file.tab" dumps the values of these members so you could also use "grep" on that (look for m_numPointObjects, m_numLineObjects, m_numRegionObjects and m_numTextObjects).
A simpler option could be to convert the files to MIF and do an automated search using a text editor or some text processing tool... but even that's not that simple.
The best of course is to know your data: in that case you'd know which files contain labels and which ones don't. We'll forgive you for not knowing your data if you tell us you're a programmer and not a geographer. ;-)
Daniel -- Daniel Morissette http://www.mapgears.com/
