NRDB Web 0.3 beta - Release Notes

About

The Natural Resources Database is a GIS tool for developing and distributing environmental databases. Its aim is to provide people in developing countries with a powerful yet simple tool to assist in the managing of their own resources.

The Natural Resources Database was originally developed for the Bohol Environment Management Office, through the assistance of Voluntary Service Overseas. This was supported through the Skills for Community-based Resource Utilization and Management (SCRUM) program, part funded by the European Union and the British Embassy. The NRDB project was extended to the Sustainable Development Foundation, Thailand, under a VSO regional programme SPARK (Sharing and Promotion of Awareness and Regional Knowledge). The development of NRDB Pro has been partly supported by Conservation International, Philippines through their Palawan Corridor Strategy Development Project. Promotion and training for NRDB Pro has been supported by the PEP-Network as part of their Community Based Monitoring System

Open Source

NRDB Web is an interactive mapping tool. It allows you to present your spatial data on your website and for users to query the data they wish to view and to navigate through maps. To display your own data through NRDB Web you must first develop your spatial database using NRDB Pro.

NRDB Web is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that the software is redistributed with the source code so that end users may make changes and improvements to the software. The GPL requires that any modified versions of the software remain free and are also distributed under the conditions of the GPL license.

NRDB Web is written using PHP server-side scripting and requires a MySQL database. Versions for other languages such as JSP may be developed in the future. If you are able to contribute to the further development of NRDB Web and by doing so assist environmental / socio-economic projects around the world please contact us.

If you use NRDB Web code on your website you must acknowledge the source as the NRDB Project and provide a link to www.nrdb.co.uk.

Configuration

Requirements

To use NRDB Web you require a website hosting package that provides PHP scripting and MySQL database support. Your web server must also have the GD image library support - run phpinfo() to check. NRDB Web has been tested using PHP version 4.3.10 and MySQL 4.0.20-standard.

MySQL Database configuration

To configure NRDB Web you must:

Create a new MySQL user (e.g. using phpMyAdmin)
Create a new MySQL database, e.g. 'nrdbweb'
Grant all privileges to this user for the above database
Edit initialise.php and set values for $dbuser, $dbpass and $database accordingly.

Uploading files

Now you can upload the files to your website (e.g. using ftp). If your configuration is correct then opening the files (e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php) will first run the SQL commands to create the demonstration database tables. Opening index.php again should display the interactive mapper.

Converting an NRDB Pro database

In order to use NRDB Web you must first convert your NRDB Pro Access database to a MySQL database. The structure of the MySQL database is slightly different than that of the Access database, a Visual Basic script is provided to undertake the translation. You will therefore need a copy of Microsoft Access to undertake the translation.

Create and open a blank Access database. Select Get External Data, Link Tables from the File menu.

In the file open dialog select the Access database containing the NRDB data. In the Link Tables dialog Select All the tables and click on OK.

On the Objects menu of the left hand side of the screen click on Modules then New to open the Microsoft Visual Basic window. Now paste the script from Access2MySQL.vba into this window.

You may need to select additional libraries: From the menu select Tools, References and check Microsoft DAO 3.51 Object Library.

If you now click on Run the screen will go blank and the script will start extracting data. Note this may take several minutes/hours depending on the size of your database. (Press Ctrl-break to interrupt)

When the script has finished, the output is written to the file nrdbweb.sql (located in My Documents). The file contains the necessary SQL commands to recreate the database in MySQL (create table, insert into etc.). If you view the output in an editor DO NOT SAVE CHANGES as this may introduce new lines in the middle of binary data!

Uploading the database

You now need to upload this file and run the SQL queries to create your MySQL database. You should upload (e.g. using ftp) the SQL script file you created above, i.e. nrdbweb.sql, to the same folder as the other NRDB Web files. Now you should run the script to create the NRDB tables in your mysql database, e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/upload.php. The SQL statements will be displayed.

Now you need to modify the parameters in the PHP script files. First edit initialise.php and modify the parameter values as appropriate. These include the size of the map image, the default extent of the map to be displayed in coordinates and the URL of the index and preview pages. Remember to set the database, username and password parameters.

You should also modify the parameters in the function drawmap (drawmap.php) to reflect the colours the map should be displayed in. You can also specify overlay and underlay features to be displayed on the map by uncommenting the example code and setting ftype and attr arguments as appropriate.

In nrdbmain.php you should modify the text appropriate to you project. You are required to retain a link to the Natural Resources Database Project website.

Now upload the PHP script and image files to your website, e.g. to a subdirectory nrdbweb. It should now be possible to display maps through your website. If not then check that you have set the necessary parameters correctly.

Support

Please use the NRDB Users' Forum to obtain assistance with the NRDB Web software.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to William Manuel for the hosting of NRDB Web.

Thanks to TuanAnh Le for identifying bugs in release version.

Version History

NRDB Web 0.3 beta

Database: Automated upload of demonstration dataset no longer hangs
Initialisation: Only deletes tables if they already exist

NRDB Web 0.2 beta

Mapping: Centroids for polygons pre-processed during translation
Database: Polygons stored uncompressed for faster extraction
Database: Retrieves latest data only by default
Database: Labels now support linked feature names
Database: Handles point data
Interface: Zoom now part of navigation not query

NRDB Pro 0.1 beta

User interface: User can select a feature type, label attribute (text, number, boolean, link) and a spatial attribute (polygon, polylines or coordinates)
User interface: Navigation, north, south, east, west and zoom level
Administration: Configuration file settings for database, user name and password
Administration: Configuration file settings for default map extent
Administration: Ability to configure base and overlay maps to be combined with user selected maps
Administration: Ability to configure the size of the map output
Database: Ability to query feature types, feature type attributes and map objects (polylines, polygons and coordinates; labels; dates)
Database: Support for one-to-one inheritance. I.e. When querying feature 'municipality population' can use polygon attribute and feature names from parent feature type 'municipality'.
Mapping: Output base layer, user selected and overlay layers
Mapping: Output closed polygons as filled
Mapping: Output non-closed polygons as lines
Mapping: Output coordinates as a standard symbol
Mapping: Labels should be arranged to avoid overlaps
Mapping: Maximum zoom extent to 100m image width

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