[mapserver-users] RFC 74 "DBINCLUDE"

[Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul)]

Robert,

I've commented on this one in the past here in the list.

My thought was to add in the capability of passing a URL through the INCLUDE, the URL(could be limited to the same domain, but wouldn't need to be) would simply hand back a Mapfile fragment.  An example would be something like:

INCLUDE 'http://MyServer/cgi-bin/MyCGI?CGIParams=whatever'

The idea being that the service handles the mapfile fragment assembly, which can be a whole LAYER fragment if needed, complete with a DATA/CONNECTION chunk.  There is some obvious overhead here, but quite a bit of flexibility is introduced as well.

I'm sure there are some security concerns with an approach like this as well.

Bobb



From: mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Robert Hollingsworth
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 4:21 PM
To: MSusers OSGEO
Subject: [mapserver-users] RFC 74 "DBINCLUDE"

I'm looking at implementing RFC 74 "Includes from non-file connections," i.e., using a database query to bring in a section of mapfile, as an alternative to the INCLUDE filename that's in there already.

Some interesting and powerful capabilities hinted at in the RFC, such as,
"A common use case is providing a custom classed layer for an individual."
and
"Another common case is dynamically classifying a layer as the data changes. With SQL, a text string can be calculated on the fly from the data itself, by looking at the DISTINCT values of a dataset to generate the classes that will be used to display that data."
There have been some threads in this space that lead me to believe this feature could be a good thing to have around.  It might serve as the foundation for providing for non-database sources for mapfile includes in the future.  I'd invite interested parties to look at the RFC and comment back with possible additional use cases, to see how well the prescribed mapfile syntax for this supports those uses.

Thanks,
Robert H.


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