Re: [udig-users] Attribute help for new user

[Silvia Franceschi <silvia.franceschi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gerald,
honestly I don't think that there is something to connect attribute of two shapefiles, but the second option of adding a new attribute in your shapefile is fine.

I tried to do this by adding an attribute "LEASED". I then planned to manually enter the data for some of the parcels as an integer, and use a theme to display the data as colored parcels on the map. However, I can't add an attribute.

I tried reshaping the shapefile to add a column by adding a line at the bottom of the list of attributes, but I got the following error message "Attribute 'xxx' is assigned to a non-existant attribute: 'xxx'" I can't find how to create that attribute. 

Reshape is the right command, I think you did an error. Reshape allows you to create a new shapefile from an existing one and so you can define new attributes starting from old ones or starting from zero. If you want to create a new attribute field that doesn't exist in the old shapefile and that has nothing to do with the old attributes, you have just to add a line at the end of the attributes list, as you did, but you have to write:

NewAttriuteName=0

If you want to create a new attribute field with integer values all setted to zero, or put 1, 2 or whatever you prefer.
If you want to have a new attribute field with double values, use 0.0 and so on... if you need to put a text try with ' '.

But you can not write
NewAttributeName=NewAttributeName
because you don't have this one in your old shapefile.

You can find some other informations about reshape command in uDig's help.

Hope this helps,

Silvia