[Mapserver-dev] Changing Colors in Map !!

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> 
>> Steve, Daniel, et al,
>>
>> Have you been following this thread. This is not the first time we 
>> have had this discussion with users. It is a major hassle and waste of 
>> peoples time. There was some discussion about having mapserver just do 
>> this behind the scenes, ie: to load explicitly defined colors into the 
>> look color table before implicitly defined colors like in rasters ate 
>> up all the color slots.
>>
>> something like ...
>>
>> 1) load COLOR statements first
>> 2) load symbol colors next
>> 3) load raster colors last
>>
>> It has at least one bug # 306, there might be others that are related 
>> to this.
>>
>> It would be great is someone had time to fix this issue before the 
>> next release.
> 
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I concur that this problem is a major thorn and should be resolved as soon
> as possible.  I don't know that loading raster colors ahead of time would
> be practical unless they are defined in class declarations.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply explicit loading of the color raster 
entries, only that they would get loaded last by default process that 
happens when rasters get loaded. While this would work for many of us, I 
think there may be some raster guys the would like more control that 
this, but I'll let them speak up if they care.

I have had the colors on my bitmap symbols change which for me are 
things like the Interstate highway badge where the Blue field turn gray.

Since I suspect that we can never make all the people happy all the time 
and we are talking about a compromise, another idea would be to have a 
color table object that would allow you to define the color table 
entries and a tool that scans the mapfile and prints out a table that 
you can edit and include in the mapfile. While this would be a pain, it 
would give you full control of the colors if you needed it. Or maybe 
support the automate color table generation unless there is a table 
defined, then load the table first and scan the mapfile to pick up 
additional entries not already defined in the pre loaded table.

-Steve