[Mapserver-users] dafif and mapserver

[Joe Bussell]

Greetings,
   I will let you know what I know in the hopes that it will help.  The following has worked for me, but your milage may vary.

(1) Get the data
   You will find shapefiles on the third disk.  You will need to copy those shapefiles to a local hard drive (preferably a drive optimized for speed instead of space).  You will note that the shapefiles are organized into sub-directories on the disk.  This substructure will have to be understood when creating your mapfile.

 (a) get the shapefiles and associated dbfs
cp -r /cdrom/avdafif/*  /path/to/shapefiles/

 (b) get the symbols from /cdrom/midafif/custsymb/*.bmp and convert to useful format
Using ImageMagick's convert utility:
for baseName in `ls /cdrom/midafif/custsymb/*.bmp | cut -d\. -f1 | cut -d\/ -f 5`; 
  do convert /cdrom/midafif/custsymb/$baseName.bmp $baseName.png; 
done
You will find these symbols quite useful in rendering quality maps.  These items will be used in the SYMBOL tag in your mapfile for the associated layer.

(2) Create your mapfile:
There are excellent directions for this located at:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc40/mapfile-reference.html

Pay special attention to the MINSCALE and MAXSCALE tags.  The DAFIF data is very large and you may not wish to paint every navaid at the global scale.  Additionally, remember that the order that layers are declared in the mapfile is the order that the layers are rendered.  Countries before states, polygons before points...

If you run into any snags along the way, please post to the group.  I will watch for DAFIF threads.  I have taken the liberty of cc'ing this to the group in the interest of the community.

What is the project that you are working on?

Cordially,

Joe Bussell
www.otsys.com






baas Fairchild wrote:
> Dear Sir
> 
> I found your article
> 
> http://lists.dmsolutions.ca/pipermail/mapserver-users/2003-April/008767.html
> 
> and was wondering hot to use this in my mapserver setup as easily as 
> possibly.
> 
> I have 3 cd's (dafif) and mapserver running... any hints to get me started?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> 
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