A basic shapefile to KML utility has been added to the files section. The
utility parses a shapefile and creates the equivalent Google Maps objects. At
the same time it reads the corresponding .dbf file and displays the possible
columns to add to the individual shapes.
A shapefile is in fact a
collection of different files. The most important files in the collection are
the .shp and the .dbf files (some would say the .shx file is essential also, but
it is not parsed by the Shp2Kml parser). The .shp file contains the definition
of all the shapes in a special binary format, while the .dbf file is a standard
dBase file, which contains one record for each shape record.
A shape
record can contain several Google Maps object, eg. a polyline shape record can
contain several polylines which are not connected. So when transforming the
shapefile to KML you may find that several objects have the same name and
description. This is intentional. The alternative was to leave sub objects
without name or description.
The functionality is very straightforward.
Click the 'Load Shapefile' button to load the binary definition file (the .shp
file). The converter will then parse the corresponding .dbf database and will
present the available columns. The column to use for the name is set using the
dropdown list, while the values to add to the description are selected in the
checked listbox below. Finally you need to click the 'Write Kml' button to start
writing your KML file to the selected location.
Note! The code is entirely
written in C# and requires .NET 2.0 installed on the computer to work. If you
regularly update your computer this should have been installed close to a year
ago.
You can download it here.