Not able to find some of the gdal drivers when using the java bindings as opposed to gdal by itself

Question

I am new to the gdal scene so there might be a simple explanation for my problem. When executing ogrinfo from the command line there is a large list of supported formats.

    C:\OSGeo4W\bin>ogrinfo.exe --formats
    Supported Formats:
    "FileGDB" (read/write)
    "ESRI Shapefile" (read/write)
    "MapInfo File" (read/write)
    ...

However, when I run the equivalent command through the java bindings I get the following output:

    C:\OSGeo4W\bin>java -classpath ..\lib\gdal.jar;. ogrinfo --formats
    Supported Formats:
    "ESRI Shapefile" (read/write)
    "MapInfo File" (read/write)
    ...

Notice that the "FileGDB" driver doesn't appear when accessing gdal through the java bindings. Why are some of the gdal drivers not available with the java bindings? Is it a problem with my classpath and some of the driver dlls locations?

Answer 1

You need to set the GDAL_DRIVER_PATH environment variable to the path of the gdal plugins folder. It's been a while since I've used osgeo4w, but the plugins folder is generally a folder inside of the bin folder where the gdal binaries can be found.

You may also want to set the GDAL_DATA variable as well, which should point to the folder containing all of GDAL projection (proj.4) files. This will allow OGR to reproject data.