ESRI Shapefiles come in sets. Below are some of the common file extensions found in a set of shapefiles:

.shp Contains the geometry (required for import)

.dbf Contains the text data (required for import)

.shx Index file (required for import)

.prj Contains projection information

Each set of shapefiles can only contain one entity type. So if a Think GIS layer contains multiple entity types there may be multiple sets of shapefiles. For example, the following shapefiles could all be imported into a single Think GIS layer file (.tml)

points_of_interest_pline.shp

points_of_interest_pline.shx

points_of_interest_pline.dbf

points_of_interest_text.shp

points_of_interest_text.shx

points_of_interest_text.dbf

points_of_interest_point.shp

points_of_interest_point.shx

points_of_interest_point.dbf

points_of_interest_area.shp

points_of_interest_area.shx

points_of_interest_area.dbf

Truncated Data

Long field names are truncated to 10 characters and large field values are truncated to 255 characters due to limitations of the dbf file format.

Other Limitations

SHP files only allow for one Geometry object per database record (one Entity per Feature in Think GIS terminology) so Feature records will be duplicated when multiple Entities exist per Feature.