MapInfo Professional

All current commonly used versions of MapInfo Professional can open ESRI shapefiles without direct translation. However, for ease of use within MapInfo, it is recommended that users use the universal translator within MapInfo to convert the shapefile supply to MapInfo .TAB files prior to loading the data. This will be described in the procedures for loading the data.

Loading and displaying the Shapefile supply

In MapInfo Professional, start universal translator from the ‘Tools’ menu.

MapInfo Professional window that shows Tools menu with Universal Translator option.

Select the ‘Translate’ button at the top left-hand side of the dialog box.

MapInfo Professional window showing Translate button.

In the next dialog, the user will need to select the translation parameters required. These will include the format of the files being translated, the format to which the data is being translated and the location of the data.

In the example below, the two tiles of OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data, TR15NW and TR15NE have been selected and the MapInfo .TAB data will be stored in a separate folder from the source data to allow easier data management.

Set Translation Parameters dialog in MapInfo Professional.

Once selected, click ‘OK’. The translation will then run.

FME Quick Translator dialog that shows translation has finished.

A message box will appear when the process is complete. The user will now have a MapInfo .TAB file for the OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data. This procedure should be repeated for any extra tiles of OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer which are needed.

To load the created MapInfo .TAB files into MapInfo Professional, simply click ‘File – Open’ and navigate to where the files are located. Select the file to be opened. Select ‘New Mapper’ from the drop-down menu and click ‘OK’. A point to note is that MapInfo will open the data un-styled as shown in the screenshot below:

Greenspace Layer data displayed un-styled in MapInfo Professional.

Styling the data

Data loaded into MapInfo Professional, unlike many other GI applications, is better styled at translation stage because the .TAB format used by MapInfo can retain all the styling information applied in the translation process – it does not use separate styling files to apply a style to the data. OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data at the current time is not supplied in MapInfo .TAB format. Therefore, there is no Ordnance Survey published styling information for use in MapInfo Professional. It is, however, possible to style the data manually in MapInfo and achieve a successful result.

To add a style to a layer which has been loaded, open the layer control window, and then select the ‘Style Override’ box.

OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data tables contain all the elements of the data within one MapInfo table, as can be seen from the layers listing.

MapInfo table showing greenspace data layers.

Therefore, to style an element of the OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data, it will be necessary to use SQL commands to query the original .TAB data, pick out the specific element to style and create a new

.TAB file for that element. This procedure will take some time to carry out for the whole dataset. An example is provided here for guidance, but a better option would be to use a more specialised translation software application to convert and style the data in one procedure.

From the toolbar menu, click ‘Query – Select’.

Display showing MapInfo Professional toolbar menu with Query - Select option.

In the next window, the user will need to type in the parameters to query the data. In this example, we are going to set up a query to select all the private gardens in one of the two tiles that we have loaded. Click on the ‘Assist’ button and another window appears.

MapInfo Professional dialog box that shows Select Records query with Assist button highlighted.

Query dialog box showing regular expression for selecting private gardens from dataset.

The above expression will extract the private gardens from the original .TAB file. Click on ‘Verify’ to check if the expression is correct. Once satisfied, click ‘OK’. Then click ‘OK’ in the next window and the query will run. The user should see something like the following.

MapInfo Professional window showing result of Query select to extract features with priFunc=private garden.

This query will now need to be saved into a new table. Select ‘File – Save Query’.

MapInfo Professional window that shows File - Save query menu option.

In the next window give the query a name.

Save table query dialog and file explorer

We are going to call this TR15NE_Private_Garden.

Click ‘Save’ and then close the query browser window. The user may need to close the query and any other private garden table open firstly by clicking ‘File – Close’ and selecting the open query table. Then, click on ‘File – Open’ and select the new Private Garden .TAB file just created. The user can open the table in a new mapper or add it to the one that is already open. For this example, it will be added to the one already open in MapInfo.

MapInfo Professional dialog box to open table containing entries with private garden.

The data will now be loaded. To check to see if the table has been loaded, click on the layers button in MapInfo to display the loaded layers.

MapInfo Professional window with layers button selected.

The new table has been loaded. It will now be possible to add a style override to the private garden table by clicking on the style override button and bringing up the following window:

Region style dialog box in MapInfo Professional.

Several style options can now be applied to the private gardens. Click ‘OK’ when finished. The style will now be applied to the data.

MapInfo Professional displaying greenspace features with private gardens, using previously defined style.

In this screenshot, the private gardens are now coloured with a green fill. As stated previously, this method is quite laborious, and is not recommended for anything other than styling small areas of data. The best alternative would be to use a specialised software package to translate the data and style it during translation.

Merging multiple Tab files in MapInfo Professional

In MapInfo, it is possible to merge the elements of two .TAB files together into one new table using the ‘append’ function. This only works for data tables of the same type and will only work for two .TAB files at a time. Please note that the file into which the new data is appended will need to be saved as a new table at the end of the process. This append process should be repeated if more than two .TAB files need to be merged. For OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data, all the data elements are contained within a single

.TAB file so the append process is simpler than if the data was made up of multiple elements, as with the open version of the product.

It is highly recommended to back up the original OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data tables before performing any append function, as the options for carrying out this procedure in MapInfo are limited. If multiple areas are required, it would be better to merge the original shapefiles together before translating the data into .TAB format for use in MapInfo Professional. A free open-source package called ‘GeoMerge’ can be used to merge shapefiles. This application is available from:

http://www.vdstech.com/geomerge.aspx

MapInfo Professional window showing Table - Append rows to table menu option.

To append .TAB files together, select ‘Table - Append Rows to Table’ from the main menu.

MapInfo Professional dialog box to Append rows to greenspace table.

Select the two tables to append together. Click ‘OK’. The data from TR15NE will now be inserted into TR15NW. The user will need to save the table at the end if the appended data is to be retained. Click ‘File – Save Table’ once the append process has completed. Once the table is saved, TR15NW will now contain the data for the whole area. This is verified if the new table is opened in MapInfo:

MapInfo Professional display showing the data from appended rows to greenspace table.

Deleting duplicate entries from the merged table

There are several ways of doing this in MapInfo Professional. One of the ways, using SQL queries, is described in the MapInfo knowledge base article which can be found here:

https://customer.precisely.com/s/article/Deleting-duplicate-records-and-retaining-map-objects-in-MapInfo-Pro?language=en_US

Loading GML data into MapInfo Professional

MapInfo Professional will convert OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer data in .GML supply into un-styled MapInfo .TAB format, using the Universal Translator tool built into MapInfo Professional version 12.5 onwards. As previously described, select ‘Tools – Universal Translator’ from the main menu.

MapInfo Tools menu with Universal Translator option selected.

In the next window, click on the ‘Translate Data’ button.

MapInfo Translate Data button.

In the next window, select ‘GML (Geography Mark-up Language)’ from the list of format options. Then, select the tiles which need to be translated and a destination folder for the data to be stored. Click ‘OK’ and the translation will begin. A message will appear at the end stating that the translation was successful if all the input parameters have been set correctly.

MapInfo dialog box to Set translation parameters with GML format selected.

The data can now be loaded into MapInfo Professional as .TAB format in the normal way. A point to note is that the translation from .GML to .TAB can produce a single OS MasterMap Greenspace Layer table covering the whole area, avoiding the need for appending files.

MapInfo window showing display of data resulting from translation of GML file to TAB format.