[Geomoose-users] itemquery -> highlighted map, but no results listed in the Information tab?

[Johan Forsman]

Hello All:

Some interesting troubles with GM 2.0.1 and itemquery. My original setup on MS4W caused any query against PostgreSQL to crash in some DLLs and I have been entirely unable to trace the root cause of the crashes. Queries against shapefiles worked fine but were generally too slow on that particular hardware/software (workstation-class Pentium4 with WinXP) combination for practical use.

I decided to try something entirely different and repurposed an old dual-Xeon server-class machine and installed Centos 5.4 on it with the FGS package from MapTools.

I have migrated my MS4W setup of GM2.0.1 to the FGS setup. After editing links and filenames to obey unix-like conventions most things are working properly, with a substantial increase (3X-5X) in rendering and query speeds which was a very pleasant surprise and bonus. It is really remarkably faster in every aspect.

All layers render fine, the Select tool works properly, and the Identify tool works properly, but the query tool works a little mysteriously.

After making some changes to the mapfile on the FGS setup the query tool now runs (I had to add the SHAPEPATH directive; I am not sure why) and returns a highlighted map with the correct number of highlighted points, but there are no results listed in the Information tab.

The header is there and the footer is there, but nothing from the template file is displayed. No headers, no titles, and no results.

I have set MapServer, PHP, and Apache to log errors to files, and increased log levels.

I see no errors listed in either of the three log files.

Currently I am using Shapefiles only. I have built a PostgreSQL database and it works great for displaying the data, but any query against the database from inside GM results in a peculiar error shown in Apache's error log:
[Fri Dec 18 13:06:44 2009] [error] [client 10.201.10.172] File does not exist: /opt/fgs/apps/geomoose2/htdocs/favicon.ico
httpd: mappostgis.c:1819: msPostGISLayerResultsGetShape: Assertion `layer->layerinfo != ((void *)0)' failed.
[Fri Dec 18 13:06:50 2009] [notice] child pid 13749 exit signal Aborted (6)
NOTE: the 13749 pid is the httpd daemon owned by user apache.

This error appears to happen well before MapServer has a chance to log any related errors to ms_error.txt, based on the lack of data with a similar timestamp in that file, and there are no PHP errors shown in its logfile either.

Since the move to the new hardware/software combo has resulted in such a drastic decrease in response time I am content, for now, to use shapefiles if I could only determine why the template is not successful. It works fine as-is on the MS4W setup.

Does the collective have some ideas of where I can look for potential culprits?

Thanks!
/Johan.