[Mapbender_dev] http_auth wrt layers and wms services

[Michael Schulz]

Hi Devs,

currently I am testing the http_auth module and I can say it is really
cool. I will soon update the wiki page since we discovered, that when
using php as a cgi module you will need one additional apache
rewriting rule in order for http_auth to work. I have a question,
about the general behaviour of the http_auth and the involved wms.php
script. Since the module was developped for the Geoportal RLP its
paradigm is a layer based approach to generating capabilities
documents.

In my use case a central mapbender installation shall be used to serve
different complete wms-services to the users, that themselves used
also either a mapbender or a desktop GIS to consume the services. For
this use-case it is not practical to have each layer of a wms served
by separate capabilities document.

That's why I would like to suggest an additional http_auth
configuration parameter in mapbender.conf, that switches between
either the layer based approach or a service based approach. In the
service based variant when a getcapabilities request is made to any
layer of a wms service the complete wms service with all layers is
returned to the caller.

At a first glance this is only a minimal change (atm if this wms based
approach is requested, I just dont append the layer id to the sql
querying a wms sublayers, wms.php line 775+), but I'm under the
impression that wms.php is currently not able to handle nested layers.
Can someone confirm this? If this is the case, I would have to look
into wms.php to be able to retrieve also nested layer structures in a
wms service, presumbly recursive.

Are there any major objections to such a change, because of
side-effects I haven't thought of? Armin, what do you think?

Cheers, Michael

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Michael Schulz
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