style/color based on feature values?

[Bobby Braswell]

Hi-

I'd like to assign polygon colors that are rendered based on the  
value of one of the feature attributes. In my case there are nearly a  
hundred possible discrete classes. I could write a script to generate  
a mapfile layer with a hundred classes, but I'd prefer to make a  
direct link to the shapefile if possible. I hope this question makes  
sense.

It seems like "styleitem" should be the thing to use here, but I have  
not figured out how to make this work.

In any case if someone could post an example of either a continuous  
or discrete rendering of polygon colors based on one of the data  
fields in the shapefile, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Rob Braswell