fun with ESRI shapefiles

        Hi folks.
        I pulled down a sample of AND's global road data
        from the ESRI website
        (http://www.esri.com/data/online/and/sampleusadata.html)
          and have been having a devil of a time
        getting it to work in OpenMap.
        I hope someone here might have some insights
        into my problems.

        First, since I didn't know about the EsriLayer class
        (I haven't looked at OpenMap for a while)
        I generated ssx's for each shp
        and converted the dbfs to csv's via Excel.
        The conversion left several suspicious characters
        in the csv, but I deleted them and things looked
        kosher. However, when I tried to use an
        AreaShapeLayer to display the data,
        a bunch of errors were thrown along the lines of
        "Don't have information for shape record X".
        I turned on the debug.csv flag and discovered
        that the CSVFile parser wasn't reading in ANYTHING
        from the csv file. I banged my head against this
        for a while, and eventually gave up.

        Finally, after looking through the list archives
        a bit, I discovered the EsriLayer class
        in com.bbn.openmap.plugin.esri.
        Unfortunately, the first time I ran with it
        the only thing I saw on the map
        were the outlines of the features.
        I had to muck around a bit
        (modifying EsriLayer to set the DrawingAttributes
         on the ShpInputStream in order to get the fill
         and line colors right) in order to get the drawing
        attributes set properly.
        So, while I've managed to use this
        to duplicate the functionality of ShapeLayer,
        it's still not enough, since I'd also like to see
        labels for the names of various features
        (highways, names, etc) appear as specified in
        the .dbf file.

        So, er, how can I do this?
        Is there some ready-made solution that I'm missing,
        or am I really going to have to get down and dirty
        to get the information from that dbf file
        up on the map?

        Ugh.

- Matt

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