iOS Can an app export data to shapefile .shp?

[Hyloba]

Excuse my newness, but is there any way an app can export input data to a shapefile .shp?

Thanks in advance!

 

[dantastic]

I don't know of any 3rd party library that is able to handle shapefiles. The best way to deal with this is to use an online converter to convert to geoJson. iOS is well able to handle JSON.

 

[Hyloba]

I don't know of any 3rd party library that is able to handle shapefiles. The best way to deal with this is to use an online converter to convert to geoJson. iOS is well able to handle JSON.

Good to know iOS has no problem with JSON! But for work we have a windows program that exports our data to a shapefile if necessary. It's not often necessary, but still. It's a horrible program though and I'm thinking about making an iOS app in place. However I am not familiar with swift or xcode..

 

[dantastic]

Depending on the size and detail of the area you could be having to churn quite a lot of data. Even though modern iPhones are pretty fast you could still find that you need to process the file for several seconds, could be 30 seconds even.

If you want an iOS app to convert geo data to shapefiles for use somewhere else I'd recommend against, it doesn't make any sense. Write a tool that can run on a server instance (too many options to mention).

GeoJson makes sense if you are downloading geo data to your app from a server. If you are going to preload the geo data you are much better preloading a sqlite file where the data has already been parsed into the correct format for use in your app.

 

[bjet767]

It's been done, always check GitHub to see what others are doing.

https://github.com/grgcombs/iOS-Shapefile
https://github.com/TomGarske/iOS-Zip3-Mapkit

Check them out.