[Mapserver-dev] Re: time support

[Daniel Morissette]

(I decided to move this to mapserver-dev)


Steve Lime wrote:
> Do you mean TILEINDEX or the new TIMEINDEX? I could certainly see doing
> filtering on the TIMEINDEX, especially as applied to non-raster data.
> Using filters on tiles could certainly be done but would there be any
> real practical use for the output. The new TIMEINDEX is accomanied by a
> TIMEID, and the TIMEID could be interpreted as a MapServer expression so
> you could process mutiple files at one time. 

I didn't know about the name of the new TIMEINDEX so I really meant 
TILEINDEX.

My idea was simply that instead of creating a new TIMEINDEX we could 
simply extend the existing TILEINDEX to support filter expressions. The 
expression could be based on time or on any other attribute in the 
tileindex file.

We would also need to extend the expressions stuff in MapServer to 
support time comparisons and time ranges. That would be a generic 
enhancement to the expression stuff and could be class EXPRESSIONs and 
not just in the layer FILTER.

Does it make more sense? I'm scared I'm not expressing myself very well...

> That would be more work to
> add than simply interpreting TIMEID as a single value.
> 

I actually thought that extending the TILEINDEX to support FILTER would 
be simpler.  Would it not just be a matter of adding a call to 
msEvalExpression() in the code that scans the tile index?

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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