[Mapserver-dev] Feature Questions..

[Alan Steremberg]

Hi,

Here is one of the things I want to do:

1) Display a zoomed in map of weather stations (from a database? from a
shapefile?)
2) If there are less than 20 on the map, number them 1-20 as the symbol
3) include a table on the same page that lists the 20 stations, with
fields from the DBF/Database
4) be able to get the xy image coordinates to make a client side click map


This would be similar to the hotel listings on Expedia when you click
'show hotels on a map'.

I have dug through the mapserver code and read some of the documentation..
I got somewhat close to this by changing the code so it will do a query by
rectangle (using the rectangle of the screen) and then running a template
query in addition to creating the map, ie: combining the query and map
display stuff into one web page.

It seems like what I really want is a concept where I can turn on a
'template query' for each layer in the .map file, and have the code store
away the x,y location, and table fields when it goes to render the shape.
Otherwise, connectors that don't support random access to each row (like
the mapmygis.c connector) aren't supported.. Plus this would mean that it
wouldn't need to load the data twice. (Potentially you would need to
specify in the map file which fields to load, so that it could store them
all away).

Changing the symbols to 1-20 markers, seems like a whole different set of
modifications, or maybe it is already possible.

I have thought about doing some of this in mapscript, but really would
rather write everything in C...

I also have a prototype version that supports the 'clearsilver.org'
templating system, instead of the built in one.  clearsilver is pretty
nice, we run our entire website using it..

Any ideas on how to implement these things:
   1 - without making code modifications?
   2 - in a manner that will make sense and be accepted as code changes
   3 - am i missing something completely? :-)

Alan


----------------------------
 Alan Steremberg
 415-543-5021 x 103
 http://www.wunderground.com