[mapserver-users] querying WMS layer / WFS reprise

[Gregor Mosheh]

On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 bartvde at xs4all.nl wrote:

> > Is this cascading thing an issue for MapServer's WFS implementations
> > as well? Could a MapServer WFS-client layer be queried?

> I just tried this and you can query a LAYER of CONNECTIONTYPE WFS. So no
> problems there, but that's because this is a GML "datastore" just as
> shapefile is a "datastore". With CONNECTIONTYPE WMS you cannot access the
> data itself as a (WMS) client, that's the big difference.

Excellent, that's what I would have expected, since it's just vector
data by the time the client/displaying MapServer sees it. Thanks for
confirming that for me - you saved me an hour or two.

I spent the last day experimenting with WFS, since that's what we *really*
want to be sending instead of images, and came to the conclusion (that
seems to have been confirmed by some others on the list) that WFS is
incredibly slow (as in, several minutes) because of the GML encoding,
which made it unsuitable for use in dynamic map layers.

WFS' slowness surprised me: should a feature list being sent to the client
never contain more than several items? Or is this a "problem" with
MapServer's implementation of a WFS server? Would another WFS server
(GeoServer?) do it faster and be able to send more items in a reasonable
period?