[mapserver-users] attribute bindings for SYMBOL and FONT?

[Brent Fraser]

The short story:
----------------
   Is it possible to bind a CLASS's SYMBOL object to an attribute (i.e store the 
symbol name as a attribute of a feature)?  And the LABEL objects FONT name?

The Long Story:
---------------
I've been working with the yet-to-be-released Feature Editor in Geomoose v2. It 
allows the user to digitize features (points, lines, and polygons) and assign 
attributes, then stores them in PostGIS.

I want to allow simple styling and don't want to have a map file the size of 
"War and Peace", so I thought I would use the attribute/item/column binding 
abilities of Mapserver's CLASS and LABEL objects.

To that end, one of the columns the feature table will be "style name" (or maybe 
"feature class"), which I'll use to join to a style table (with COLOR, WIDTH, 
etc columns) to get the feature rendered in a simple style.

After a quick review of Mapserver's doc, most of the most important objects can 
be bound to attributes, with two exceptions, SYMBOL 'name' and FONT 'name':

CLASS
   STYLE
	ANGLE [angle]
	COLOR [color]  #R G B
	OUTLINECOLOR [olcolor] #R G B
	SIZE [size]
	WIDTH [width]  # v5.2

	SYMBOL 'name' # in SYMBOLSET

   END #STYLE

   TEXT ([label])
   LABEL
	ANGLE  [label_angle]
	COLOR [label_color]
	OUTLINECOLOR [label_olcolor]
	PRIORITY [label_priority]
	SIZE [label_size]

	FONT 'name' # in FONTSET
	
   END #LABEL
END # CLASS

How difficult would it be to have attribute binding for SYMBOL and FONT?  I 
suppose I could use mapscript, but I'd rather not.

Thanks!
Brent Fraser