[Geomoose-users] New to GeoMoose.

[Nelson Soto]

Hello,
   As I'm sure has been said many times, I am new to GeoMoose. I have
a limited set of experience with MapServer. I am running MS4W (on
Windows, naturally) and GeoMoose 1.2. I was able to get the county and
state demos running succesfully.

   I was hoping to get to learn how to use GeoMoose by copying the
county directory to a new folder renamed to maps_medway (the demo I am
going to run will just display 3 or 4 layers of the town of Medway in
Massachusetts) and making copies of the html, xml, and .js files in
the webdocs folder. It's important to note that I did delete all of
the shape files for the counties and just mime'd the structure and
created 3 folders with their respected .shp's and .map's; a
landrecords folder with a parcel.shp, a a driveway folder with
driveway.shp and building folder with .shp.

   I tried to replicate the formatting of the .map's that were present
in the county demo and attempted to substitute where necessary, but I
noticed a lot of inconsistencies in between different maps such as the
formatting of the DATA parameter where we point to the .shp. I have
reason to beleive this is where my main issue is.

   I went through these files and ran searches for the word 'county'
and replaced it with the correct directories for my shape files. Some
of the .map files for the layers seem to point to
'/countydata/blah.shp' which is odd because that does not match the
folder structure that the files for the working demo actually were in
which leads me to bleive there is some way to define 'countydata' or
any other variable and then suppliment that with a directory.

   I don't want anyone to do my work for me, I would just like a
little help in figuring this all out. I know, I should probably become
more familiar with Mapserver first before attempting to learn this but
I was able to generate images with these shp's just using the
mapserver cgi and had success in making VERY basic templates. I just
want to generate a proof of concept so that we can perhaps point more
of our resources (not just me :( ) to this.

   I know, I'm a newbie, please forgive!

Thanks,
Nelice