Adding a Shapefile

Adding a Shapefile is the core of any GIS tool. This section covers the task of adding and publishing a Shapefile with GeoServer.

  1. Navigate to the workshop directory $TRAINING_ROOT/data/user_data/ (on Windows %TRAINING_ROOT%\data\user_data) and find the following shapefiles:

    Mainrd.shp
Mainrd.shx
Mainrd.dbf
Mainrd.prj

    Copy the files in the following directory:

    $geoserver_data/data/boulder

    for Windows:

    %geoserver_data_dir%\data\boulder

    Note

    Ensure that all the four parts of the shapefile are copied. This includes the shp, shx, dbf, and prj extensions.

  2. Navigate to the GeoServer Welcome Page.

  3. Use the following credentials to Login:

    • username: admin

    • password: Geos

    ../_images/vector1.png

    GeoServer Login

  4. Click the Add stores button.

    ../_images/vector2.png

    Add stores link

  5. Click the Shapefile.

    ../_images/vector3.png

    Add a new shapefile

    Note

    The new data source menu contains a list of all the spatial formats supported by GeoServer. When creating a new data store one of these formats must be chosen. Formats like Shapefile and PostGIS are supported by default, and many other formats are available as extensions.

  6. On the New Vector Data Source page, enter “Mainrd” in the Data Source Name and Description fields. Finally click on Browse… in order to set the Shapefile location in the URL field and click Save.

    Note

    The Mainrd.shp was copied in the data directory, inside the “data/boulder” folder.

    ../_images/vector4.png

    Specifying Shapefile parameters

  7. After saving, Click Publish.

    ../_images/vector5.png

    Publishing a layer from the shapefile

  8. Set the Coordinate Reference Systems EPSG, in this case EPSG: 2876. The Name and Title fields should be automatically filled.

    ../_images/vector6.png

    Populate fields.

    Scroll down the page and generate the bounds for the layer by clicking the Compute from data button in the Bounding Boxes section.

    ../_images/vector7.png

    Generating the layer bounding box

  9. Scroll to the bottom of the page, notice the read only Feature Type Detail table and then click Save.

    ../_images/vector8.png

    Submitting the layer configuration

  10. If all went well, you should see something like this:

    ../_images/vector9.png

    After a successful save

    At this point a shapefile has been added and is ready to be served by GeoServer.

    ../_images/vector10.png

  11. Choose the preview link in the main menu and filter the layer list with mainrd:

    ../_images/preview_shapefile1.png

    Selecting the mainrd shapefile in the layer preview.

  12. Click on the OpenLayers link to preview the layer in an interactive viewer:

    ../_images/preview_shapefile2.png

    The mainrd shapefile preview

In the next section we will see how to load a ShapeFile into PostGIS.