[udig-devel] New IService?

[Jody Garnett]

I just did something similar for a commercial project (the shapefiles 
were included with the plugin). So your approach is known to work :-) 
Basically make a new IService (it need not resolve to a DataStore); and 
for each member use a ShapefileDataStore to aquire the FeatureSource / 
FeatureStore as needed.  No code well *know* that these are shapefiles; 
they will just show up as normal data.

> In a plugin I'm writing, I have a set of standard shapefiles. The 
> location of these files can change (the user has to set some 
> preferences to tell the plugin where to look) but the set of files is 
> fixed by the plugin - the list may change with future plugin versions. 
> These files will be used by an "Add standard layers to map..." type 
> command, but I'd like also to put them in the catalog for searching 
> and selection - without adding the full path to the individual 
> shapefiles (it might keep changing).
>
> Making any sense?
>
> Anyway, looking through the wiki my first idea was to create a new 
> IService. This could find the folder location from preferences and 
> hard-code the list of filenames. Then it should be able to return a 
> list of the actual shapefiles. Does this look like the right way to go?
>
> If it is - I have some questions...
> - Is there an easy way to wrap a shapefile as an IGeoResource to 
> return from the IService?
Just do it :-) You can use the existing ShpGeoResource implementation as 
an example.
> - How do I make this IService available to the local catalog?
There is a service extension to declare you have an IService at all; you 
can also define a plugin activator that adds your service to the 
catalog. The map graphics plugin uses this trick to always be in the 
catalog.
> Thanks for any help.
No worries; if you do this as a community module we can use it as an 
example for the next person :-)
Jody