Kelso’s Corner

[Editor’s note: Andy Woodruff explains how to use his quick and easy implementation of Edwin van Rijkom’s AS3 classes for loading SHP files and their DBF attributes into Flash/Flex. This library DOES NOT PROJECT your shp files, you might consider doing that first.]

Republished from the Cartogrammar blog.
By Andy Woodruff on 16 July 2009

Recently I’ve heard two friends independently inquire about some sort of basic guide for loading and drawing a shapefile in Flash. The only real tutorial/example I can recall is here, dealing with Google Maps. But these guys are looking for something more bare-bones. Being a regular user of Edwin van Rijkom’s invaluable code libraries for reading shapefiles, and usually forgetting the process myself, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a very simple set of AS3 classes that load a shapefile and throw a map on screen.

So to get those jerks off my back, I wrote a little thing called ShpMap, which supplements van Rijkom’s classes by loading and drawing a shapefile. It’s nothing fancier than that. Sometimes all you need is to get your base map on screen. (Update: just to round it out a little more, I’ve added basic loading and parsing of a shapefile’s accompanying DBF file, which contains attribute data. This also uses classes by van Rijkom.)

I hope that this class (and the several associated classes) can both be directly usable for some projects and serve as a basic guide to using van Rijkom’s classes to load shapefiles.

Dig it:

• An example that loads and displays a US states shapefile (and then puts a square on my house and colors the state of Wisconsin green). View the source code here.
• Download the source code. (My classes plus van Rijkom’s, as well as a demo US States shapefile.)

Tags: andy, as3, cartogrammar, dbf, edwin van rijkom, example, shapefile, shp, us, woodruff

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Best practices, Charting, Geography, Interactive, Mapping, Promote, scripting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.