Attribute definition names truncated in SHAPE file writer

It's amazing how long-lived the SHP file format is, considering all its annoying limitations. Beyond the known 10 character Field Name limit, there are limits on how large the Text Fields can be, how many fields are allowed, they don't work terribly well with large datasets, have flaky NULL and date/time support, are not the most field space efficient and aren't the fastest things to read/write as well............but every application with GIS integration has SHP file format support!

Personally, I agree with @erik_jan, where possible use a more modern data container. FGDBs are pretty good, and I use SpatiaLite a lot since it gives a single, portable compact file that can be quickly and easily opened and read by ArcGIS, QGIS etc. whilst being able to be easily ODBC'ed and SQL'ed natively without having to do anything else to it.

....But that doesn't stop external companies from sending us their data as SHP files. They still keep doing it!

Thanks @erik_jan. Yeah, the attributes were connected but in some cases truncated names in SHP file aren't meaningful as it only shows the 10 characters.

Considering that SHP file reader/writer is most popular format, hope 'safe' considers this enhancement in next releases.

There is nothing Safe can do about it.

I am sure they would have done it a long time ago, if it was possible.

It is a limitation of the Shape format, not of the Shape writer in FME.

Thanks @bwn. We mainly deal with SDE instead of FGDB and ton of SHP files. I didn't know about the Text field limitation that you mentioned. I've to consider using FGDB.

Hope we get all these sorted out in next releases.

Yes, it is up to ESRI to change or update the format, but they've been pretty public that even they don't want their users using Shape format anymore and would prefer them to switch to FGDB as the standard file based format. Shape is maintained as a legacy format.

It may be around for a while yet though. Microsoft recently deprecated their support for dBase in Microsoft Access (dBase being the backend non-spatial data store for Shape) as it was an "old, no longer used format". All the GIS community then madly bombarded Microsoft with "we still use it with our Shape files!" so Microsoft re-activated dBase support!

FGDB was created from SDE technology which is why they share virtually identical object definitions. A Feature Class, Relationship Class, Geometric Network etc. that exists in SDE can all be directly transposed into an FGDB and vice-versa. None of those classes exist in the SHP file format.

This was ESRI's solution that was meant to end the reliance and usage of SHP but it hasn't quite turned out that way......one problem was the ESRI was very late in releasing a workable FGDB API and then what we have today is still not quite complete......plus they didn't bank on how much people had invested into making solutions exchange data in the SHP format and didn't want to spend time/money converting them to instead exchange data in FGDB or another more modern GIS format.

However, the SHP format is unlikely to get an upgrade. ESRI doesn't even own the dBase technology it uses.