> The alternative would be to sit down a few months and grok VPF to > write a VPF2SHP converter, extracting the data relevant for me, > but i wouldn't really want to do that ;)
Oh well, you probably already know i'm a bit wacko. Somehow i love fiddling around with weird binary formats from time to time, so i just couldn't resist and read the VPF spec. It's actually not that hard. With Flex Builder and the wonderful Flash Player 8.5 in my hands, i sat down and started coding. Almost everything in VPF is organized in binary files (tables). Lots of binary files, heavily crossreferenced and indexed, conceptually a relational database. I have a small AS3 package ready that loads those files via URLStream and deserializes the tables. Sweet. All i have to do yet is figure out how exactly the tables are linked (not too hard either) to write a simple browser app, so that i can browse through the entire Digital Chart of the World. I guess i have something to show next week. Ultimately, the last step is to take the data (or rather, parts of it) and render it. That's probably not as easy as it sounds, but i guess it's worth a try. At least that would give a nice demo. code: http://codeazur.com.br/vpf/VPFTest.as http://codeazur.com.br/vpf/Table.as http://codeazur.com.br/vpf/TableColumnDefinition.as trace dump: http://codeazur.com.br/vpf/dump.txt cheers, claus. _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
