[Geoprisma-users] FeatureServer, OL, GP ack!

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Alexandre,

Thanks for your quick response. I realize much (most :) of what I'm 
asking is not there. It helps me to write out my thoughts, rather than 
just think them, hence my often rambling emails.

The MapFish stuff that I have seen looks very good, but licensing 
prevents me from using it. :( Hmmm, I wonder if it would be possible to 
add GeoJson support to tinyOWS as an option.

Yes, I saw the bdga demo in GP, I'm going to use that as my model to 
build my app on.

A lot of the ideas below are just trying to think through the problem of 
building a web based GIS system. I'm trying to hold a big picture in my 
head while I deal with all the details of creating WMS mapfiles, loading 
shapefiles into postGIS, trying to figure out how to connect FS to all 
of this, etc .... you know it is just a lot of new to me pieces I'm 
trying to understand.

Do you have a roadmap of what your next steps are with respect to GP 
development. I understand just getting the project website, 
documentation and all is a big step all by itself.

Thanks again for you comments and support.

   -Steve

Alexandre Dube wrote:
> Hey,
> 
>  My quick thoughts on the subject (look inline)
> 
> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>> So you said tinyOWS was not supported in GP yet.
>> So I installed FS and started reading your past threads on 
>> implementing FS with OL, then looked at http://dev4.mapgears.com/bdga-fs/
>>
>> Now my head is ready to explode :) And this was easier then adding 
>> support of tinyOWS?
>> ok I know that is rhetorical, but I'm just saying ...
> 
> Maybe not "easier", but GeoJSON had its advantages over GML (XML).  It's 
> much lighter.  That's why we decided to go with FS instead of WFS.
> 
>>
>> Anyway, this may be a little OT, but my GP use case is a web based GIS 
>> systems or something close to that. And I have all data layers loaded 
>> in postGIS, I can create a Mapserver mapfile to display these, I 
>> already have one displaying them from the shapefiles. And I'm trying 
>> to figure out how to integrate FS and how this fits into the bigger 
>> design.
>>
>> In OL, I will likely have Mapserver (WMS? or not) base layer, and 
>> Google base layer. Then I need to be able to select one of the layers 
>> to be editable (I'm assuming only one can be editable at a time) and 
>> it will then get overdrawn via FS so edits can take place.
>>
>> I'm not sure the best way to select the layer for editing. It probably 
>> means hacking OL.layerswitcher so that the layers are in a radio 
>> button field that also selects the layer as editable and only one can 
>> be on at a time. This probably means the select control needs to be 
>> notified maybe it is listening for a layer switch change event.
>>
>> Seems like the draw/edit tools needs to be selected based on the layer 
>> type polygon, line, point.
>>
> 
> Did you look at this example [1]  ?
> 
> [1] http://geoprisma.org/samples/bdga/index.php?id=302&locale=fr_CA
> 
>> So I guess I need to pick apart the bdga-fs demo. And ideas on how to 
>> find out what the layer type is?
>>
>> And finally (or not) GP needs to be wrapped around all of this.
>>
>> I think someone mentioned that a future enhancement was to be able to 
>> upload a shapefile and install it under GP.
> 
> We're not at the state of 'development' for this enhancement yet.  So 
> far, we barely discussed the topic.
> 
>> I assume that would get loaded into postGIS, then a mapfile generated, 
>> FS cfg fragment would be generated and added to featureserver.cfg or 
>> something along these lines. Where does this stand in your plans?
> 
> That would be nice.  We could try to use MapFish-Studio to do so, I 
> don't know... (yet)...  sorry.
> 
>> I'm assuming this is all initiated from an OL application so when the 
>> server is ready with the new data, it response to OL and the code 
>> there will dynamically add a new OL layer to the map and refresh the 
>> page. Also any GP config files also need to be updated. Since a lot of 
>> stuff needs to get changed, I might make sense that the yours needs to 
>> reload the browser page before the changes are visible instead of 
>> trying to dynamically update the page.
> 
> The dynamism of the UI without reloading the page is also in a "discuss" 
> phase.  There's currently no short-period development for that, yet.  
> Contributions / ideas are welcomed :)
> 
>>
>> Thoughts, examples, help appreciated.
>>
>> -Steve
>>
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> 
>