[udig-users] Odd behavior displaying PostGIS layers from Census Shapefil

[David Epstein <davideps@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,


I am relatively new to Udig & PostGIS. I am using Ubuntu 9.04 and Udig
1.2-RC3.

I am having trouble displaying PostGIS layers generated from US Census
shapefiles available at:

http://www2.census.gov/cgi-bin/shapefiles2009/national-files

I load the shapefiles into PostGIS using this statement on the
commandline:

shp2pgsql -W IBM850 -s 4269 -c County99_d00 county99_pg US_National |
psql -d US_National

I believe that the text encoding and SRID are correct. The loading
appears to proceed without a problem.

After adding the layers using Layer-->Add, the layers are displayed in
the lefthand layer window with small X's signifying something is wrong.
The map window remains empty. The table window says "displaying
features..." but remains empty. If I right-click to see a layer's
properties, the status field of the summary window says:

RenderingProblem rendering: Exception rendering layer
DefaultMapLayer[ Test, VISIBLE, UNSELECTED, style=StleImpl[ name=Default
Styler],
data=net.refractions.udig.project.internal.impl.UDIGFeatureStore@5fb39192, query=Query:[Request All Features]
feature type: null
filter: Filter.INCLUDE
[properties: ALL]]

I was able to display these layers with some difficulty before if I did
not include the -s switch and set it manually after loading into Udig.

I am having two other difficulties, perhaps related:

(1) If I load new geometry using the commandline loader, I can see the
new tables in pgAdmin and in Udig initially, but not in the 2nd loading
screen of Udig right before it actually loads the layers. I need to
restart the program. Simply re-connecting to the database does not seem
to be sufficient.

(2) It is really unclear to me when a map configuration is "saved".
Sometimes when I close a map all the setting are kept so that when I
restart the software, my project comes up just as before. Sometimes this
does not happen. Is there a way to know this for certain? The "save"
option seems always unavailable (gray).


Any advice would be welcomed!
-david