[gdal-dev] OGR and GML?

[Ben Discoe]

Hi Frank,

(Hope i didn't ruffle too many feathers with my mail to gml-interest... :-)

> In your case would it be practical to pass in the URL and let the parser
> pull the data instead of doing it yourself?
>
> Hmm. Actually, since we make two passes this might be a bad idea.

Yes, and my code has already gone to the trouble of taking on a dependency
on Libwww in order to do cross-platform HTTP requests. I would think that
you wouldn't want to have such a large dependency in OGR.

> My second
> thought is that we engineer some esoteric format for a "filename" that can
> be used to refer to a memory buffer and then low down in the GML reader it
> can recognise this and construct a memory reader.

That sounds good, so you wouldn't have to change the API for
OGRSFDriverRegistrar::Open()

> eg.
> "OGR_GML_MEM:<pointer-offset> <memory-block-size-in-bytes>"

That would be fine. I could also simply pass the memory buffer itself. It
it begins with "<?xml" then you would know it's not a filename.

Anything like that should work fine.

Thanks,
Ben