Faulty DBF for shapefile produced by SHPTREEVIS

[richard.roger@…]

Mapserver 4.4.2 distribution running on Sun Solaris 2.8 using gcc 3.4.2 for 
building.

SHPTREEVIS does not produce shapefiles that ESRI's Arcview 3.2 (for Unix) 
would open.  This appears to be a problem with the DBF file that shptreevis.c 
writes, in that the DBF and SHP are inconsistent.  I traced it down to the 
statement on line 187 in shptreevis.c just after a "#ifdef MAPSERVER".  This 
is currently

"	this_rec = hDBF->nRecords - 1;"

but  needs to be 

"	this_rec = hDBF->nRecords ;"

if the shapefiles (incl. DBF) are to be OK for Arcview 3.2 .  Given the nature 
of the comment at the "#ifdef", I am not confident that this "fix" would be 
fully correct.  I inserted a 'print this_rec' statement after this 
assignment.  When the current version is run, it just prints out "-1" each 
time.  With my modification, it prints out a sensible sequence of integers 
starting with 0, and the shapefile (and its DBF) is read by Arcview 3.2 OK.

[fwarmerdam]

I'll take this one if you don't mind Steve. 

[fwarmerdam]

I have verified that the existing code was producing a .dbf file with no
records when I ran it.  I applied the suggested change and now a valid file
is produced. 

Change applied only in 4.5.  I don't see this as a sufficiently important
bug to backport the fix to 4.4 given the low likelyhood of a 4.4.3 release.