[Mapserver-dev] Re: time support

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> A timeindex would not be a shapefile, rather simply a temporal lookup
> table. An xbase file would do nicely. 

You're right. I didn't realize that.


> That
> way date expressions could be used with any data source if a column
> contained ISO8601 formated date/time strings. In that case using a
> timeindex for anything but raster data may not be necessary. Raster data
> is certainly the task at hand for me.
> 

Actually, some people might have one shapefile per time range (or time 
value), so I can see why this TIMEINDEX would be useful to shapefiles as 
  well. Imagine an organization with 100 years of daily weather data: 
that's too much information to store in a single shapefile if you want 
reasonable performance. I guess they would be better using a RDBMS than 
shapefiles for this anyway, but that's an example where TIMEINDEX on 
shapefiles could be used.

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