Geotools create shapefile in memory

Question

Is it possible to convert between shapefile and geojson using geotools without access to file system? I have that restriction in my web app, but I need to create shapefile as byte array and then do something with that. Unfortunately I only found a way where I need to specify new data store based on file path.

Answer 1

Despite its nice sounding name a "shapefile" is not a single file but a whole bunch (at least 3 probably not more than 10) of related files which share a common base name. This is why GeoTools requires a URL pointing to the base file (x.shp) and then picks up the other files it needs based on that location.

If you are building your shapefile in memory why not just build a FeatureCollection and then dump that out as GeoJSON (or any other supported DataStore)

Note: You will need to be working on master for the GeoJSON store as I haven't backported it (no demand yet).

Update based on comment

With some luck you can access a zipped shapefile using something like this:

URL zip = DataUtilities.fileToURL(new File("../../data/coast.zip"));
URL shape = new URL("jar:"+zip+"!/110m_coastline.shp");
Map<String, URL> params = new HashMap<>();
params.put("url", shape);
DataStore ds = DataStoreFinder.getDataStore(params );
String name = ds.getTypeNames()[0];
SimpleFeatureSource source = ds.getFeatureSource(name);
System.out.println(name+" has "+source.getCount(Query.ALL)+" features");

It's left as an exercise for the reader as to how you determine the contents of the zip file, but I guess you can do it using the Zip classes in java.util.