Hi Nyall,

There are several possible approaches to this:

- have a LIST_ALL_TABLES=YES open option. A few drivers expose it, like PG, SQLite and GPKG. But the intent here was more for drivers that use by default the content of a geometry_columns table to establish their list of layers. With LIST_ALL_TABLES=YES they expose also other non-spatial tables. But if that includes "system" tables or not is driver dependent. I see the GPKG driver still hides system tables, whereas SQLite really shows all tables, and PG exposes for example raster tables (but not pg_XXXX tables, but I don't think they are actual tables, so that might explain it)

- have a GetLayerByName() implementation that creates on-demand layers. This is implement, among other, for example in the SQLite driver. In that case, those new layers must be added to the layer list (ie freeing them is done by the driver at dataset closing)

- or just rely on ExecuteSQL("SELECT * FROM the_table"). This generally works for most drivers without adding new code, and from a quick test, this works with the PGeo driver. Except that MDBTools emits errors on the console when trying on a non-existing table. I guess some quick processing of the SQL string could be done to extract the table name, check if it exists and it it doesn't just emits a OGR error. Or have a special handling of a "SELECT * FROM "_ogr_table_list_" " that would return them ?

Even

Le 22/08/2021 à 06:33, Nyall Dawson a écrit :
Hi list,

Looking for some advice here on the best way to handle a particular
situation in some particular GDAL formats, specifically formats which
have a bunch of internal or system tables which we don't want to
expose to users in 99.99999% of cases BUT still allowing the 0.000001%
to explicitly get access to the tables when needed.

An example: the ESRI personal geodatabase format has a bunch of tables
like "GDB_Annosymbols", "GDB_Relationships", "GDB_TopoRules", etc. In
almost all cases a user won't want to see these tables exposed from
client applications so they are currently hardcoded to be skipped over
when building the list of layers for a datasource.  BUT there's
actually some useful content in these tables which an application
might want to read in very specific cases, e.g. if the application
wanted to read the topo rules to convert these to a human readable
form, or the relationship information, etc.

I can't see any way to handle this in current GDAL api -- either a
layer is exposed and accessible or it's skipped and there's no way for
a client to access it. Am I missing something, or would this require
new API? If so, has anyone any thoughts on how these could be handled
nicely?

Nyall
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