handling styles attached to objects

[Daniel Morissette]

Sebastian Schmitz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we currently encounter a problem related to handling styles that are 
> directly attached to objects. Styles are contained within the objects' 
> attribute table (eg font, size, symbol....).
> Mapserver already provides some mechanisms for that related to Labels. 
> At the layer level eg LABELANGLEITEM or LABELITEM can be specified 
> through a column in the attribute table. However, to meet our needs this 
> would have to be extended to fonts used for labelling and to the some 
> parameters within the STYLE object (). Two questions on that:
> - Could someone supply a rough estimate of cost?
> - How much would performance suffer when attaching styles at feature 
> level rather than at the class level?
> 

Sebastian,

FYI in 5.0 has a new mechanism to bind some of the style and label 
properties to shape attributes, there is some info about this in the 5.0 
migration guide:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/release_plans/mapserver_5_0/migration_guide_410_50/

The following properties can accept bindings:

     * Style: angle, color, outlinecolor, size, symbol
     * Label: angle, color, outlinecolor, size, font, priority

With respect to performance, there is definitely a cost associated with 
that, but I am not aware of any benchmarks comparing static values to 
attribute binding. If you do some performance comparisons then please 
share with the list.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/