Advanced information about read access

While reading, a Representation Table (RST) is built based on the available drawing information (line width, color, etc.). Each object read is given a REPCode attribute that points to an entry in this RST. TEXT objects also have a TextString and Angle attribute in the GDB shape containing the character string and its orientation.

On Import, if the MAPInfo table structure contains columns with the names REPCode, Angle, TextString, or RingStart, these attributes will not be imported; instead, they will be replaced by special GDB attributes with the following contents:

REPCode (Integer): index to a REPCode in the generated RST
Angle (Double): orientation for TEXTs
TextString (String): TEXT value
RingStart (CountedInt): used by GDB to regenerate polygons and polylines

These special attributes are fetched by GDB in the following order:

If the application provides setting for these attributes (through the layer's iXXXField members), these will be used.
If an attribute with the correct name and type exists, it will be used.
If both previous cases failed, default values will be used instead of attribute values.

GDB requires that the layer extents be at the beginning of the export operation to produce the best results when exporting with an RST. If the application does not provide that information to GDB, default values will be used for line widths (always 1 pixel) and symbol sizes (always 10 points). If you have such columns in your data set and want to keep them untouched, you should change their names using MAPInfo's Table Structure tool.

Note: The names are not case-sensitive.

The column types that do not have a direct equivalent in GDB are remapped without any data loss. DATEs are imported as Strings, LOGICALs are imported as Integers with 0=False/No and 1=True/Yes, and DECIMALs are imported as Floats.