[OpenLayers-Users] New to open layers some questions

[Ali Khan]

Thanks for the links. Downloaded QGIS and tried to follow the tutorial 
but still a bit lost. All I really want to do is be able to have the 
user click on a area, from that get the country name and then call a 
page ie countrydata.cfm?country=countryname

That page would then parse the country name in a query and return data 
which would be output to a div in the page...Dont really need all the 
CIA pop info etc as we'll have our own sets of info. coming from a SQL 
database.

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 03:10:32PM -0400, Ali Khan wrote:
>   
>> Hey all, new to open layers. Right now i'm trying to develop something 
>> similar to that CIA factbook where one can click on a country and get 
>> the details. I've got the click stuff down and how to grab the 
>> coordinates but what i dont understand is how to figure out the country 
>> by the coordinates. I noticed witih the fact book it takes the 
>> coordinates and i believe makes a box from them with max and min 
>> long/lats and does something from there?
>>     
>
> Posts to the server, and interprets the response. The server is
> MapServer in this case.
>
>   
>> Can anyone help me shed some light on this? Is there a general file that 
>> has the country data and coor that i can call on to get the country name 
>> from?
>>     
>
> MapServer does this against the dataset it's rendering.
>
> http://data.freemap.in/view/DataSet/1 has a couple different copies of
> the data for download. 
>
> http://openlayers.org/presentations/mappingyourdata/ might help you get
> started with mapping the data.
>
> Regards,
>