Update

iDelveConnect is a fully-automated WFS caching application, built on iDelve technology, that obtains spatial data from remote WFS data sources, and stores it locally for access by GIS applications and business systems. Take a look at the iDelveConnect product page and our earlier blog post previewing the technology for more detailed information.

You may be aware that we announced iDelveConnect some time ago, but unfortunately have not made a public release of the software to date. We have, however, been extremely busy developing and beta-testing the iDelveConnect with a number of clients within Western Australia as well as adding a number of new features (see below).

We can now announce that following our extended beta-testing phase, we will be releasing the version 1.1 progressively during September. Please sign up to receive iDelveConnect on the iDelveConnect product page.

New Features

You will be pleased to know that during our extended beta-testing period product development has not been standing still! Over the period, we've added a number of new features into the iDelveConnect product. Some of these are iDelveConnect-specific, others are benefits that have been incorporated as part of improvements to the underlying iDelve technology.

Some of the new features include:

• Oracle 10g+ and ESRI ArcSDE support
  We've added support for Oracle and ArcSDE spatial database back-ends. This means that iDelveConnect may be used to cache remote WFS sources into these local spatial databases, increasing the flexibilty with which you can access the cached data locally.
• Local database index configuration
  Once the spatial data has been cached locally it can be useful to add database indexes to selected columns within the cached tables. This is now trivially possibly using iDelveConnect's GUI web interface.
• Post download SQL scripting
  In order to utilise the cached data effectively within your local environment, it is often extremely helpful to be able to update the cached data according to your specific needs. This function allows you to use iDelveConnect's web interface to specify SQL, Beanshell or other JSR 223 scripts that operate over the data once caching of a layer has been completed.
• Region Restrictions
  Heavy data layers can place increased load on the target WFS server, and in particular may result in multiple requests that reach the feature limit (WFS "maxFeatures"). For example, land parcel boundary data is particularly "heavy" (features densely packed) within the metropolitan area as compared with rural areas. iDelveConnect's new Region Restrictions feature enables hints to be provided to iDelveConnect regarding the density of heavy data layers, enabling the WFS requests that are made to be optimised.
• Incremental update improvements (when using checksums)
  Checksum colums within database tables are used for data consistency checks and for determining when changes have been made to the data within particular database rows. When using checksum columns for a spatial data layer, iDelveConnect is able to more efficient download incremental updates (rather than needing to download all of the data again). This incremental update process has been further optimised to save on download bandwidth for layers which are configured to use checksums.

Coming soon

We thought to give you a preview of upcoming features as well!

• ArcGIS Server support
  The next version of iDelveConnect will be able to connect with ESRI's ArcGIS Server using the REST APIs. This will enable caching of remote ArcGIS Server layers as well as utilising a local ArcGIS Server to cache remote data (either WFS or ArcGIS Server data).
• Pre-configured for SLIP Enabler
  Additionally, we will shortly release a version of iDelveConnect that is pre-configured by our SLIP Developer partner Amristar Solutions for caching WFS data supplied by the Landgate's SLIP Enabler. All that will be required to start caching SLIP is to enter your personal/oranisation's SLIP credentials!

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