[Featureserver] user level cfg?

[Lehtonen, Mika]

Hi Christopher,

from my point of view, personating a web application is user related, 
anyway till some extent, even though any authentication, registration, 
session management or what so ever would be used. The idea of attaching 
userid into the request was something that just came up. It doesn't 
close anything else out. Having a possibility to use your own data in 
commonly shared webGIS application without any other end-user seeing it, 
shouldn't be so strange idea. For example, without getting paranoid, you 
might have something confidential geographic data in your possession, 
data which your employer don't want you to share. You wouldn't invite 
every man walking in the street to your home, would you?

BTW, I'm not a novice in Python, I'm all new to it. But I'll see what I 
can do. Anyway, in order system to be dynamic, you also have to create 
those files and manage inserting, deleting and updating of the 
datastores. But I guess I can do all that with the Perl script I already 
wrote for featureserver.cfg editing.

- mika -

Christopher Schmidt kirjoitti:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 03:15:32PM +0200, Lehtonen, Mika wrote:
>   
>> Hi there,
>>
>> what you think about user level cfg-file for FeatureServer?
>>
>> I've been writing an application where user can upload his/her own shp 
>> or whatever data into FeatureServer. What's bothering me a little is 
>> that everybody can see what others have uploaded into it. I don't mean 
>> that my work would be involved with any top secret data serving, but 
>> some privacy could be appreciated. What I was thinking, is that is it 
>> feasible/possible to construct a FeatureServer with user level cfg?
>>     
>
> There are so many things you could mean here that I can't even guess
> where to begin. The short answer is "Yes, there are many things you
> could do". 
>
>   
>> I don't have any Python experience, so it's quite hard to inspect the 
>> code in order to find out that. Anyone having any comment on this?
>> Mainly I was thinking about passing an userid with the request like: 
>> ...featureserver.cgi?user=bill ... And the procedure would be that FS 
>> would check the bill.cfg to see if there's any datastores defined. If 
>> any userid  weren't attached, FS would use the default featureserver.cfg.
>>     
>
> So this is completely unrelated to users. Instead, you simply want to
> modify the featureserver.cgi to pull the config file name from the
> request -- even a novice Python user can probably work that out.
> specifically, you'll be changing the 'cfgfiles' variable: it's already
> in featureserver.cgi, just set it equal to the filename you want t use,
> using cgi.FieldStorage() to pull the request parameters from the GET
> string...
>
> Regards,
>