Writing shapefile metadata with geotools

Question

Using GeoTools, I'm able to write features to a shapefile by essentially passing a SimpleFeatureCollection to a ShapefileDataStore. The feature collection provides both a schema and features including their attribute values.

In addition to having the row-per-feature attribute table in the shapefile, I'd like to include file-level metadata - either structured fields or at least free-text title/description fields. Is there support for doing this in GeoTools? Or do I need to serialise my own *.shp.xml file?

Answer 1

The ,shp,xml file is a later ESRI specific addition to the 'standard' and is not documented anywhere so is not supported by GeoTools (or any one else).

The package org.geotools.data.shapefile.xml has a ShpXmlFileReader, but no ShpXmlFileWriter yet.

If you do develop some code to serialize metadata then feel free to offer it back to the GeoTools team.