[mapserver-dev] Support for complex features : doable ?

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Wondering if anyone here has though a bit, or more thoroughly, how MapServer 
could be extended to support complex features (for WFS) such as the ones of 
Inspire application schemas. The lack of support for them becomes a serious 
problem for existing MapServer users that have to comply with Inspire.

Looking at the GeoServer documentation about app-schema ( 
http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/data/app-schema/ ) or Deegree one ( 
http://download.occamlabs.de/documentation/3.3.9/html/featurestores.html#sql-
feature-store §6.5.2 and following) shows the level of difficulty, just at the 
configuration level. I guess that the implementation complexity would be way 
higher.

My intuition is that it woud likely require parsing and understanding GML 
application schema. XPath analysis. And a code base with a much more object 
oriented approach to model concepts of DataStores, Types, Features, 
Properties, multiple geometries per features, etc... Our current modeling of 
shape attributes as a "char **values" is probably too simplistic...

I'm not sure the current codebase (and functionnality) could survive such an 
effort ;-)

Thanks

Even

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