Just a quick summary, in case anyone was interested in the topic. My
original message is attached at the bottom of this message. The only
response I received is included as well (Thanks, Craig).  This wasn't
exactly what I was after, but will most likely come in handy later. I
eventually solved my problem via the ODBC Data Source Administrator. I
had to change the default MaxVarChar setting (254) in the database
driver's Advanced options.

Jason



"Hunter, Craig" wrote:
>
> Jason,
>
> I don't know if this will help, but I work with ORACLE and SDE connections
> in AV. Through my experience I have found that the field name has a maximum length
> of 10 characters. This caused some problems for my projects.  For example, your         > fieldname project_tag will get truncated. To get around this problem I created a        > dictionary, truncated the fieldnames myself and set as the dictionary keys.
> Then I would attach the original (longer) name to the key.  Then I would set
> the alias field to the original name, via the dictionary, after table creation.
>
> Like I said, I don't know if this will help but maybe this methodology could
> be modified to solve your problem.
> Good Luck.
>
> Craig Hunter
> Affiliated Computer Services
> Government Solutions Group
#############################################################################
Original Message

  I'm working on connecting Arcview to a Postgres database. I'm writing
scripts to create polyline shapefiles from the database. I have this
working to some degree, but have run into a serious problem. Arcview
seems to be truncating elements from the database. I'm building my
shapefiles from record sets with the following format:

project_tag      path_tag       path_data
test1            a2b            [(x,y),(x,y),(x,y),(x,y)]

  Looks easy enough right? That's what I thought, initally. The
"path_data" field seems to have a maximum width of 200 (****I was wrong
here - 254 characters****) characters. Many of the paths that I am going
to be working with will have significantly more data than this will
allow. Does anyone have suggestions for how to
work around this? I've tried setting the "path_data" field's width to
500, but this only works _after_ the record set has been created and I
cannot recover the lost data. I would greatly appreciate any advice,
suggestions, etc and, of course, I will SUM.

Thanks,
Jason
--
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Jason Shields
GIS Engineer
NextBus Information Systems
1321 67th Street
Emeryville, CA 94608
(510) 420-3115
(510) 652-0349 FAX
http://www.nextbus.com
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