Thinking in GIS

zigGIS 1.2, the Open Source ArcGIS Desktop's connector to PostGIS, has just been released and you can download it here.

This is a major release, as far it implements new important features like selections and rendering. At this time editing is still not supported (so it is still a read only connector). Also ArcMap documents persistence is now fully supported, meaning that you can save your mxd document with your PostGIS layer in them, and then open them again without problems. zigGIS should correctly work with ArcGis 9.0 (sp3), 9.1 and 9.2. Before installing it don't forget to install .NET support for ArcGis.

Here is a list of supported and unsupported features in ArcMap with zigGis 1.2:

supported features: -direct PostGIS data read in ArcMap, whitout the need of converting data to Shapefile or Geodatabase -document persistence -tools on standard toolbar, overview, magnifier -selection by graphic, by attribute and by location, selection operators (add, remove, ...) -layout, graphs and reports -copy & paste layers -attribute table, with selections, sort, statistics, freeze column -selection layer creation -transparency -scale range -any simbology renderer (features, categories, quantities, charts, multiple attributes) -fields tab in layer properties -definition query tab in layer properties -labels tab in layer properties -layer projections

unsupported features (will be in next releases) -feature class and attribute table export (this actually crash ArcMap) -Joins -editing

What in the future?

We would like to implement ASAP editing capabilities and Catalog objects. Bill Dollins is already developing PostGIS ArcCatalog objects. Already at this release you will find in ArcCatalog a pretty "OGC Database Connection" node. From there it will be possible to create the OGC connection, for now only PostGIS ("Add new PostGIS connection"), but maybe in the future also for other OGC db (Oracle Spatial, MySQL Spatial...). The tool is still not working, at this release, but gives an idea of what zigGis will become in the next releases.

If you are are experiencing problems installing and using zigGis, please use the zigGIS group and do not email me directly: I am not the only one working at this project (Abe and Bill are also on the road) and your questions may be of interest for the whole group.