[Featureserver] featureserver and dynamic layers?

[Bud P. Bruegger]

Hi Josh,
 
> One thing that might help is if you can describe some specifics about 
> the type of querying you need.  For example, I am planning to add 
> something to the PostGIS datastore that will allow you to explicity 
> state what kind of operator to use for matching in the queryable 
> layers.   So then you could do something like 
> &queryable=cost&cost__lessthan=15 ... this would translate to some SQL 
> such as 'WHERE cost < 15'.   I would add support for just a few 
> operators, but I think this could be powerful for a variety of cases 
> (and would let me remove some ugly hacks I've added to some local fs 
> projects).  So anyway, is this the type of thing you are thinking you 
> are looking for when you say complex queries?  Or something else?

I confess that I don't have clear ideas on this myself--partly because
I have to cover a large domain of yet unknown usecases ;-(

One thing that I would like for myself (and other super users) would be
to shoot a full queury (any SQL string) to FS.  I suppose this is not
what one wants to expose to the outside world though (or some or your
friends), but would be nice to have...

On the side of the more controlled world, beyond what you had in mind it
may be nice to have spatial constraints either relative to a geometry
that is part of the query or relative to geometries in other layers.
Examples that come in mind are these:

* get me all trees that fall into buildings (we need to validate/clean
tree data from one survey method and integrate them with the buildings
originating from another)

* get me all <features> that fall into a polygon (or multi-polygon)
drawn in OpenLayers.  This is meant as a selection tool.

BTW, the latter is also related to a "batch-update" tool that I need to
produce. Use example:  Most of the species attributes we have for our
trees are wrong, and I'd like to batch assign attributes (e.g., the
species) to a whole set of trees that was selected.  

Sorry for not having clearer ideas yet.  In the meantime I'll also look
at the code of featureserever (is there an SVN or similar?)

cheers
-b