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Hi, I have geometry in one Oracle table and attribute information in
another which I am merging using feature merger. This works fine, the problem I
then have is that I need to write to shapefile and it truncates fields to 254.
In one particular field there are 100+ attributes that are over 2000 characters
in length. I know I can use substring extractor to extract various lengths but
does anyone know how I could ‘automatically’ create x number of attributes (each
less than 254 characters) so that I would have 10 attributes of 254 length etc.
that would make up 2,540 characters? Thanks

That is correct, shape files don't support text fields longer than 254 characters.

Also, you cannot have more than 255 fields in a single shapefile, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile#Data_storage, so splitting your 100+ attributes into 10 pieces each (grand total 1000+ attributes!) isn't going to work either.

Is it possible to use any other format, i.e. something more modern that supports large text fields?

You could also consider only including the primary key + geometry in the shape file, then writing all the text attributes to some other format (CSV?) with a foreign key that references the shape file contents.

Another tip, you might use a 'Joiner' transformer instead of a feature merger. As your database will get larger, the Joiner appears to be faster than a FeatureMerger!

Another tip, you might use a 'Joiner' transformer instead of a feature merger. As your database will get larger, the Joiner appears to be faster than a FeatureMerger!

Thanks, I'll try that...

 

 

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