[geotk] code for parsing WMS Capabilities docs

[Jonathan Blower]

Hi Johann,

Thanks very much for this information.  I've just started to play with
your WMS Capabilities parsing code and it looks great so far - it's
going to save me a lot of time, so thanks!  I have a few comments and
questions from my experiments:

1) WmsServer.getCapabilities() throws no checked exceptions.  This means
that there is no specified way to catch an error, such as a WMS server
not responding.  I would have to catch an (unspecified) runtime
exception to deal with this condition.  Can I suggest creating and
throwing some appropriate checked exceptions such as
ServerNotResponding, InvalidCapabilitiesDocument, WmsException (for the
case where the server returns an XML exceptions document), or some
better names that you can probably think of?

2) There seems to be no way to pass an UPDATESEQUENCE string to
.getCapabilities().  This would be useful for me (but not urgent) to
help with cache consistency.

3) More importantly (for me) there is no AbstractLayer.getTitle() method
(or .getAbstract()), so I can't get the displayable title of a layer.
Is there a way I can get this information by delving into lower-level
code?

4) Lastly, I'm using Maven to manage dependencies and there seem to be
an awful lot of dependencies for geotk-client-wms.  I guess this is
because of the whole geotk dependency tree and is probably not easy to
change, but I wonder if most of these dependencies (e.g.
geotk-coverageio) are really needed for the "simple" job of parsing WMS
Capabilities docs?

Anyway, thanks again for your code!

Jon

-----Original Message-----
From: johann sorel [mailto:johann.sorel at geomatys.fr] 
Sent: 18 May 2010 23:37
To: Jonathan Blower
Cc: geotoolkit at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [geotk] code for parsing WMS Capabilities docs

Hi,

I guess we have something that looks like metadata database : MDWeb for 
exemple which purpose is to store metadatas or also the Coverage-SQL 
database. But even if they can store thoses informations I'm not sure 
that's what you are looking for.

About time and elevation, the current rendering engine of geotoolkit 
pending can handle thoses, Multi-dimentional navigation is not a sweet 
dream, works for coverages, features and WMS (by sending the appropriate

time and elevation parameters in the query).
Here is a small demonstration on features : 
http://jsorel.developpez.com/temp/tempele.ogv

Johann Sorel