... and then I encountered a bug in Postgis 2.0.4. Fuck. ST_geomfromgeojson rounds my z-values to integers, effectively making them useless.

I have a little example demonstrating this, and so I imagined to submit a bug. Unfortunately the bug-tracker requires an OS-Geo account, and to get that I need to write an email to get a "mantra" (see form ). Done that.

So what did I do (note just random-numbers):

insert into original_be_geometries(originally_type, originally_id, geom) 
values ('Test', 1, ST_setSRID(ST_GeomFromGeoJSON('{"type":"LineString","coordinates":[[1.23445,2.234455,3.33445],[4.12345,5.12345,6.56789],[7.012,8.111,9.0001]]}'), 31370) );

some random-numer, but if I then do something like select st_astext(geom) from original_be_geometries where originally_type= 'Test'; I get

LINESTRING Z (1.23445 2.234455 3,4.12345 5.12345 6,7.012 8.111 9)

Fuck. Instead if I use ST_GeomFromText it does work:

insert into original_be_geometries(originally_type, originally_id, geom) 
values ('Test', 2, ST_setSRID(ST_GeomFromText('LINESTRING Z (1.23445 2.234455 3.33445, 4.12345 5.12345 6.56789, 7.012 8.111 9.0001)'), 31370) );

returns the expected geometry

LINESTRING Z (1.23445 2.234455 3.33445,4.12345 5.12345 6.56789,7.012 8.111 9.0001)

So I am going to switch my workflow from exporting geojson to exporting WKT's which I can then use to import. Now if only oracle supported 3d geometries when exporting to WKT this would be easy :eye-roll: :le-sigh: :rolls-up-sleeves: :)

[UPDATE] My team-mate has Postgis 2.2.2 and there this just works. I did not find this bugfix in the changelog, but this is good news. Damn. Now I have to upgrade my postgresql/postgis. Using brew. OMG! Last time I lost a weekend trying to get it fixed, I think I will still write my own sdo2wkt3d instead ;) (and update later).

Let me quickly introduce WiceGrid, if you do not know yet: it is a super-gem that will allow you to easily show a list/grid of items, and allow easy filtering/searching/pagination.

For rails there is, afaik, no better alternative. There are some javascript/jquery driven dynamic grids, but for me the big advantage is that with WiceGrid all work is done server-side, which is ideal when handling large sets of data.

Since you can just render html in any column, we do for instance the following for our KLIP platform :

In our first we show our internal identifier, and the external identifier. In code this looks like this:

g.column name: 'Id', in_csv: false do |pr|
  render 'title_with_info', plan_request: pr
end

and the partial title_with_info looks like

%h4
  = plan_request.ident
%p.text-muted.small
  = plan_request.maprequest_id

But now the problem is: how can we, when filtering, automatically look for both fields? WiceGrid automatically handles one field, but not both. Luckily, WiceGrid allows us to define custom filter types. What we want is:

• we want the filter to just look like a standard string field
• we want to build a query which will search for ident or maprequest_id.

Adding your own custom filter types is not entirely clear in the documentation, I had to take a look at the code to fully understand it. So that's why I decided to write it in detail here.

It takes three steps:

• define a class to create the correct filter (a conditions generator)
• define a custom filter_type inside WiceGrid, using your custom class
• use the class in the column definition

Create Conditions Generator

Inside lib/wice/columns add a new file called conditions_generator_column_plan_request_identifier.rb and add the following content:

module Wice
  module Columns
    class ConditionsGeneratorColumnPlanRequestIdentifier < ConditionsGeneratorColumn #:nodoc:

      def generate_conditions(table_alias, opts) #:nodoc:
        if opts.kind_of? String
          string_fragment = opts
          negation = ''
        elsif (opts.kind_of? Hash) && opts.has_key?(:v)
          string_fragment = opts[:v]
          negation = opts[:n] == '1' ? 'NOT' : ''
        else
          Wice.log "invalid parameters for the grid string filter - must be a string: #{opts.inspect} or a Hash with keys :v and :n"
          return false
        end
        if string_fragment.empty?
          return false
        end

        table_name = @column_wrapper.alias_or_table_name(table_alias)
        op = ::Wice.get_string_matching_operators(@column_wrapper.model)
        search_value = "%#{string_fragment}%"

        [
            " #{negation} (#{table_name}.ident #{op} ? OR #{table_name}.external_id #{op} ?)",
            search_value, search_value
        ]
      end
    end
  end
end

This class is actually almost copied from the standard column generator, except I generate a different condition at the end, where I compare with two fields with an OR operator. This way I will find results if either the ident or the external_id matches the search-value.

Define filter type in config

In config/wice_grid_config.rb add the following:

Wice::Defaults::ADDITIONAL_COLUMN_PROCESSORS = {
  plan_request_identifier_filter: ['ViewColumnString', 'Wice::Columns::ConditionsGeneratorColumnPlanRequestIdentifier']
}

We just use the standard ViewColumnString to just show us a string filter.

Use the filter_type in the column

To enable the filter in the column, we just have to write the following:

g.column name: 'Id', attribute: 'ident', filter_type: :plan_request_identifier_filter, in_csv: false do |pr|
  render 'title_with_info', plan_request: pr
end

When you encounter SSL errors when installing gems on Windows, the easiest workaround is to change your sources from https://... to http://.... But ... I am an avid user/fan of rails-assets.org and today I suddenly started getting the error on their domain.

So at first I feared that rails-assets had stopped as foreseen (in this ticket), but the site was still reachable, and actually they switched (imho just two days ago) to a new maintainer, which is awesome: the future of rails-assets is safe for now.

But there is no rose without a thorn and now rails-assets enforces TLS (which is actually a good thing), so it is always SSL and gem cannot ignore SSL anymore. Doh! So I was stuck on windows.

I tried to make gem command ignore ssl errors regardless, by creating c:\ProgramData\gemrc with the following content:

---
:ssl_verify_mode: 0

and that partly worked: I was now able to fetch the index, but now I received the SSL error on the first gem retrieved from rails-assets, so I was still not in the clear. I had to make sure the SSL verification actually worked!

Fortunately, after some googling this proved easier then expected! The root cause is that ruby on windows (or openssl) has no default root certificate. So I found a good description how to fix that on windows.

I used the boring/easy/manual approach, in short:

• download the cacert.pem file from http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem. I saved this to my ruby folder (e.g. c:\ruby21).
• add an environment variable SSL_CERT_FILE, so ruby can pick it up. E.g. in your command prompt type set SSL_CERT_FILE=C:\ruby21\cacert.pem. To make this a permanent setting, add this to your environment variables.

In a system I am helping to develop a person can be linked to a myriad of things, including themselves, so we use a relation table PersonRelation defined as follows

class PersonRelation
   belongs_to :person
   belongs_to :personifiable, :polymorphic => true
   belongs_to :person_relation_type
 end

So a person could be linked to different "personifiable" things, and sometimes the meaning of the relation can change (e.g. a person could be an owner or a renter --expressed by the relation type).

In our datamodel, a person is actually a "legal person", so it could also be an organisation, and an organisation can have contacts. Logically a contact belongs to one or more organisation by following the association in the reverse direction.

When using rails 3+ up until 4.0 we wrote the association as follows:

has_and_belongs_to_many :contacts,
                          :join_table => "person_relations",
                          :class_name => "Person",
                          :foreign_key => "person_id",
                          :association_foreign_key => "personifiable_id",
                          :readonly => false,
                          :conditions => ["personifiable_type = ? and people.archived_at is null and person_relations.archived_at is null and person_relation_type_id=?", "Person", PersonRelationType::CONTACT],
                          :insert_sql => proc {|record| "INSERT INTO person_relations(person_id, personifiable_id, personifiable_type, person_relation_type_id, created_at, updated_at) VALUES('#{self.id}', '#{record.id}', 'Person', 6, current_timestamp, current_timestamp)" }

  has_and_belongs_to_many :organisations,
                          :join_table => "person_relations",
                          :class_name => "Person",
                          :association_foreign_key => "person_id",
                          :foreign_key => "personifiable_id",
                          :readonly => false,
                          :conditions => ["personifiable_type = ? and people.archived_at is null and person_relations.archived_at is null and person_relation_type_id=?", "Person", PersonRelationType::CONTACT],
                          :insert_sql => proc {|record| "INSERT INTO person_relations(person_id, personifiable_id, personifiable_type, person_relation_type_id, created_at, updated_at) VALUES('#{record.id}', '#{self.id}', 'Person', 6, current_timestamp, current_timestamp)" }

Pretty complicated, but it does the job :) Now we keep getting deprecation warning because :conditions, :insert_sql, :finder_sql are all deprecated and essentially removed in rails 4.1+. I kept postponing because it seemed like really hard to translate. But one suggestion in the error-message is to use has_many :through instead.

We already had the following statement in our Person model:

has_many :person_relations

so for a simple linked model, we could just write

has_many :parcels, through: :person_relations, source: :personifiable, source_type: 'Parcel'

and likewise, for our contacts, we just have to add a condition, but on PersonRelation, so we write:

has_many :contacts,
           -> { where("person_relations.person_relation_type_id" => PersonRelationType::CONTACT)},
           through: :person_relations,
           class_name: "Person",
           source: :personifiable,
           source_type: 'Person'

I am not really happy with the explicit mention of person_relations in the condition, this might impact chainability later on, but I am not sure how I could handle that differently. For now this does the job really cleanly.

Now the problem is how to follow the reverse association (from the contacts to the organisations), and actually this also proves pretty simple. If I "reverse" the person-relations first, than we can use that as the through table:

has_many :reverse_person_relations, as: :personifiable, class_name: 'PersonRelation'
  has_many :organisations,
            -> { where("person_relations.person_relation_type_id" => PersonRelationType::CONTACT)},
           through: :reverse_person_relations,
           class_name: "Person",
           source: :person

At first I felt that the deprecation of :insert_sql, :delete_sql, :finder_sql would be an insurmountable hurdle, but actually it proved pretty simple to fix and in the end a lot easier and even more readable. Nice :+1:

There is this recurring problem we have in GIS: getting road-segments and wanting to show complete roads. The naive approach would we to do something like the following:

insert into street_geoms
select ro.rd_ro_ident, ro.rd_ro_name, ro.com_code, ssdo_aggr_union(sdoaggrtype(rd.ro_geometry, 0.005)) as geom
from rd_road ro, rd_ro_sec ros
where ros.rd_ro_ident = ro.rd_ro_ident
group by ro.rd_ro_ident, ro.rd_ro_name, ro.com_code;

For good measure: we have 45.000+ roads, with a total of 230.000+ road segments. So when that query starts running and starts taking a long time, I started googling. Apparently there are two faster alternatives: SDO_AGGR_CONCAT_LINES and SDO_AGGR_SET_UNION. While the first was really quick, completed in minutes, the result was completely wrong (complete segments were missing). The second might be quicker, but it was really hard to get an idea about any progress, and if it would fail, everything should be lost (rolled back).

So I decided to write a little script, and issue a sql statement for each single road, allowing me to track progress and added restartibility. For each road I issued a statement like:

insert into street_geoms
select ro.rd_ro_ident, ro.rd_ro_name, ro.com_code, sdo_aggr_set_union(CAST(COLLECT(ros.rd_ros_geometry) AS mdsys.SDO_Geometry_Array),0.005) as geom
from rd_road ro, rd_ro_sec ros
where ros.rd_ro_ident = ro.rd_ro_ident
  and ro.rd_ro_ident = 1895101 
group by ro.rd_ro_ident, ro.rd_ro_name, ro.com_code;

I added some ruby code around it, to make sure it tracked the progress and calculated the remaining time, just to have an idea. The first "large" road it stumbled upon literally took hours. It only had to join 39 segments. A simple query learned I had 150+ roads with more segments, and a maximum of 125 segments in the database. I could not just simply ignore them :) So this was not going to work either.

Why would this be so hard? I just wanted to throw all linestrings together into one geometry. How could I do that? Querying the geometries was really easy, so what if I joined the geometries outside of oracle? And wouldn't that be hard? But there is a simple solution: convert the strings to WKT, and join all LINESTRING in a MULTILINESTRING. This would just be simple string manipulation. I can do that ;)

I had some hiccups with this approach: handling the long strings proved a bit akward (use CLOB instead) and I had to regularly call GC.start to make sure the open cursors were released. And I had to make sure not to build a string literal which was too long (ORA-06550).

But in the end I was able to join the road-sections for the 45.000 + roads in approx 1.5h, which is not blindingly fast, but faster than 1 single SDO_AGGR_SET_UNION operation :) :)

For reference you can see the full code:

class StreetGeom < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.primary_key = 'rd_ro_ident'
end

def format_time (t)
  t = t.to_i
  sec = t % 60
  min = (t / 60) % 60
  hour = t / 3600
  sprintf("% 3d:%02d:%02d", hour, min, sec)
end

def eta(count)
  if count == 0
    "ETA: --:--:--"
  else
    elapsed = Time.now - @start_time
    # eta = elapsed * @total / count - elapsed;
    eta = (elapsed / count) * (@total - count)

    sprintf("ETA: %s", format_time(eta))
  end
end

all_roads = Road.count
geoms_to_calculate = all_roads - StreetGeom.count
@total = geoms_to_calculate

puts "Joining geometries for #{all_roads} roads [still #{geoms_to_calculate} to do]"

cntr = 1
@start_time = Time.now

done = 0

Road.order(:rd_ro_ident).each do |road|
  street_count = StreetGeom.where(rd_ro_ident: road.rd_ro_ident).count
  print "\rConverting #{cntr}/#{all_roads} [#{eta(done)}] "
  if street_count == 0
    print "..."
    $stdout.flush

    ## get all geometries in WKT format
    get_geoms_sql = <<-SQL
      select sdo_cs.make_2d(ros.rd_ros_geometry).get_wkt() as wkt_geom from rd_ro_sec ros where ros.rd_ro_ident = #{road.rd_ro_ident}
    SQL

    cursor = Road.connection.execute(get_geoms_sql)

    line_strings = []

    while row = cursor.fetch
      line_string = row[0].read.to_s
      line_strings << line_string[10..-1]
    end

    insert_sql = <<-SQL
      DECLARE
        wkt_str clob;
      BEGIN
        wkt_str := 'MULTILINESTRING(#{line_strings.join(", ';\nwkt_str := wkt_str || '")})';
        insert into street_geoms(rd_ro_ident, name, com_code, geom)
        values (#{road.rd_ro_ident}, q'[#{road.rd_ro_name}]', '#{road.com_code}',
             sdo_util.from_wktgeometry(to_clob(wkt_str)) );
      END;
    SQL

    Road.connection.execute(insert_sql)
    done += 1
  else
    print "_"
  end

  cntr += 1

  # periodically cleanup GC so we release open cursors ...
  # to avoid ORA-1000 errors
  if (cntr % 50) == 0
    GC.start
  end
end

print "\n"
puts "\n\nDone!"

and I run this script in the rails environment as follows: rails runner lib\tasks\join_road_geometries.rb.

We are in the process of migrating an old GIS system. For our new systems we use POSTGIS. But this one still uses oracle. The data is spanning two countries: Belgium and the Netherlands. Our system does something awful: all data is stored in RD (the dutch coordinate system, using Oracle SRID 90112).

So how do we get data into the system: belgian data is entered as Lambert 72 (oracle srid 327680) and then transformed to 90112.

Our client uses a customised viewer that shows the data either in RD or Lambert72. Now we want to switch to a more generic solution, and show the data in WGS84. We are using oracle 11, so my initial process was the following

• extract belgian data from tables, convert back to 327680 (SDO_CS.transform(geom, 327680))
• set the SRID to 31370 (which is the correct/best srid for belgium --it has the correct transformation to wgs84) as follows: update be_geoms bg set bg.geom.sdo_srid = 31370 (so without transformation)
• for dutch data I just set it to 28992
• and then I transform both to WGS!

Easy! done! ready! However ... I was not ... The data was not positioned correctly. So I checked the definition in MDSYS.CS_SRS for both 28992 and 31370 and compared it to epsg.io and lo and behold: both where wrong. So now I had to update them.

Updating EPSG:31370

delete from mdsys.cs_srs where srid=31370;
Insert into MDSYS.CS_SRS (CS_NAME,SRID,AUTH_SRID,AUTH_NAME,WKTEXT,CS_BOUNDS,WKTEXT3D) values ('Belge 1972 / Belgian Lambert 72',31370,31370,'IGN Brussels www.ngi.be/html-files/french/0038.html','PROJCS["Belge 1972 / Belgian Lambert 72", GEOGCS ["Belge 1972", DATUM ["Reseau National Belge 1972 (EPSG ID 6313)", SPHEROID ["International 1924 (EPSG ID 7022)", 6378388.0, 297.0], -106.869,52.2978,-103.724,0.3366,-0.457,1.8422,-1.2747], PRIMEM ["Greenwich", 0.000000], UNIT ["Decimal Degree", 0.0174532925199433]], PROJECTION ["Lambert Conformal Conic"], PARAMETER ["Latitude_Of_Origin", 90.0], PARAMETER ["Central_Meridian", 4.3674866666666667], PARAMETER ["Standard_Parallel_1", 51.1666672333333333], PARAMETER ["Standard_Parallel_2", 49.8333339], PARAMETER ["False_Easting", 150000.013], PARAMETER ["False_Northing", 5400088.438], UNIT ["Meter", 1.0]]',null,'PROJCS[
  "Belge 1972 / Belgian Lambert 72",
  GEOGCS["Belge 1972",
    DATUM["Reseau National Belge 1972",
      SPHEROID[
        "International 1924",
        6378388.0,
        297.0,
        AUTHORITY["EPSG", "7022"]],
      TOWGS84[-106.869,52.2978,-103.724,0.3366,-0.457,1.8422,-1.2747],
      AUTHORITY["EPSG", "6313"]],
    PRIMEM["Greenwich", 0.000000, AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],
    UNIT["degree (supplier to define representation)", 0.0174532925199433, AUTHORITY["EPSG", "9122"]],
    AXIS["Lat", NORTH],
    AXIS["Long", EAST],
    AUTHORITY["EPSG", "4313"]],
  PROJECTION ["Lambert Conformal Conic"],
  PARAMETER ["Latitude_Of_Origin", 90.0],
  PARAMETER ["Central_Meridian", 4.3674866666666667],
  PARAMETER ["Standard_Parallel_1", 51.1666672333333333],
  PARAMETER ["Standard_Parallel_2", 49.8333339],
  PARAMETER ["False_Easting", 150000.013],
  PARAMETER ["False_Northing", 5400088.438],
  UNIT["metre", 1.0, AUTHORITY["EPSG", "9001"]],
  AXIS["X", EAST],
  AXIS["Y", NORTH],
  AUTHORITY["EPSG", "31370"]]');

... and this worked and now my transformation for Lambert is correct!

Updating EPSG:28992

... proved to be a little trickier. I assumed I could just reuse the same method as for the belgian coordinate system (yes, I know, assume = ass-u-me).

I was unable to just delete or update 28992 because I got an error that a child record existed: ORA-02292 with reason COORD_OPERATION_FOREIGN_SOURCE. Googling this revealed nothing at all.

So I had to dig deeper. And deeper. Actually MDSYS.CS_SRS is actually a view which tries to update the underlying tables. And the TOWGS84 coordinates, which I had to change/update, are stored in SDO_DATUM. So after some searching, it actually proved to be quite easy. To updated the EPSG:28992, I just had to do:

update mdsys.sdo_datums set
  shift_x = 565.417,
  shift_y = 50.3319,
  shift_z = 465.552,
  rotate_x = -0.398957,
  rotate_y = 0.343988,
  rotate_z = -1.8774,
  scale_adjust = 4.0725
where datum_id = 6289;

EXECUTE SDO_CS.UPDATE_WKTS_FOR_EPSG_DATUM(6289);

My first initial (naive) assumption was that the SDO_CS.UPDATE_... functions would actually retrieve the latest EPSG definitions, unfortunately no such luck :) :)

Stuff like this makes me appreciate PostGIS even more.