[Mapserver-dev] Generic tiling (for shapefiles and rasters)...

[Steve Lime]

Hi Folks: As I've been putzing with enhanced tiling support I've been
trying to generalize things
so that one wouldn't be limited to simply shapefile tile indexes. For
raster data that shouldn't be
an issue using another LAYER as a tile layer. This would allow you, for
example, to store your
tileindex in PostGIS and reference images on the file system. For
shapefiles it's not that simple
though because of this need to open one tile as a template (to get item
names and such). I can'd
find an easy way to retrieve, for example, the 1st record in a layer.
(For rasters this isn't an 
issue since we don't need a template.)

So, there are a couple of options:

  - say the hell with non-shapefile tile indexes for shapefiles, but
allow them for rasters

  - figure out a method to retrieve the nth element of a datasource
(not by ID, but by position)

  - retool the msLayer... functions and move the msLayerWhichItems
functionality someplace else

I'm partial to the first one. I can't imagine anyone using
non-shapefile tile indexes with shapefiles 
(I mean, most folks would put everything in PostGIS or SDE). Raster
data are where that functionality
makes sense.

I just want to run the idea by folks to make sure I'm not overlooking
some obvious solution.

Steve