Can't run mapshaper-xl commands programmatically

[davidvermeir]

Mapshaper has what I can consider to be a great feature where you can run the commands programmatically directly from Node:

var mapshaper = require('mapshaper'); mapshaper.runCommands('-i shapefiles/*.shp -o geojson/ format=geojson');

However, I've noticed that it isn't possible to run mapshaper-xl commands in the same way. For triggering parsing of large files this would be very useful.

Unless I'm overlooking something?

[mbloch]

This is a good suggestion... I'll think about how to support allocating more memory to the runCommands() function.

Regarding the API, an optional second argument torunCommands() might work:

mapshaper.runCommands(commands, {xl: true})
mapshaper.runCommands(commands, {xl: "16gb"})

[mbloch]

I just published a new release with this functionality.

Instead of adding an option to runCommands(), I added a new API function, runCommandsXL(), which takes an optional value for setting a custom value for the heap, e.g. {xl: "16gb"}. The default heap size of runCommandsXL() is the same as mapshaper-xl: 8gb.

I'll document this in the mapshaper wiki soon.

The reason for adding a new command instead of overloading runCommands() is that setting a custom heap size would change the behavior of runCommands() a bit. To change the default heap size, I have to run Node + mapshaper as a subprocess, which means it's no longer possible to pass in input datasets as an argument to the runCommands() function. runCommandsXL() is limited to file i/o.

[davidvermeir]

Wow, that was fast! Thx, I'll try this on Monday!

[davidvermeir]

Works great, thx!