Custom GDAL Raster support not working (9.3.1 SP1, 9.4 Beta 2, and 10 Prerelease)

[JacquesBeaurain]

I apologize for creating a new thread as there are already some places with complaints about this, but I hope to unify what is known and unknown about this issue and hopefully elicit an official response and help from ESRI on this matter.

I posted the following at the end of February since we were using the old RDO system (for which support has been removed since 9.4 beta): http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/1483-3rd-Party-Raster-Dll-Support-in-10?p=4980

The only official details on how to do this is here: http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=downloads.detail&downloadid=204 but I cannot even get a sample dll to load using 9.3.1 or 9.4 or 10. It scans the gdalplugins folder (I used the Procmon SysInternals utility to monitor file and directory accesses) to get the list of dlls in it but never even accesses or opens the files. There is a user comment at this link with no answer complaining about the exact same issue.

The following link complains that there is no SDK for GDAL available for 9.4/10.0: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/844-Custom-GDAL-raster-filter-not-working-in-9.4 It does imply that they somehow managed to get this to work in a previous version, although I cannot determine how.

There is a bug in the system since November 2008 (NIM040337) that basically complains that the documentation on this is thin and that there is no working example (as we had at one point with the RDO system) that shows that this is actually working here: http://resources.arcgis.com/content/nimbus-bug?bugID=TklNMDQwMzM3

Regards,
Jacques Beaurain
Geosoft Inc.

[MarcN]

Development of a 9.3.1 custom GDAL filter should work. We have done this. Unfortunately the documentation is very poor.
There are some important points which may prevent your dll from beeing loaded by ArcGIS:

• Implement the functions in your DLL as described in the GDAL documentation. It is important that you have a function __declspec(dllexport) void GDALRegister_ABC(). Here ABC ist the short name of your format and must match the code used in the DLL name (see next point).


• The name of the DLL must be in the format gdal_ABC.dll where ABC is the short name of your format.


• Put the DLL in the folder <ArcGIS_Install>\bin\gdalplugins (create the folder if it does not exist)


• Modify RasterFormats.dat as described in the documentation. Unfortunately the docu is not very good here and the parameters are mystic. <e on="y" nm="This is my new map format"     ex="*.abc"  et="ABC"  at="0x27" />

Now check that the data files with your registered file extension is available in ArcCatalog (Tools->Options->Raster->File Formats).

[NGOC-HIENHO]

At ESRI Dev Summit 2010, Joe Roubal said in his demo that the new GDAL driver sample for 10 includes the files for GDAL 1.6 will be posted on Image Management Resource Center, but I could not find it.  Anyone has clue where I can get it?  Thanks.

[JeyasinghNavaneethan]

Sample is now posted.

http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/image-management/details?entryID=457D0F2B-1422-2418-7F4B-51...

[MarcN]

Good to hear this 🙂